


Syzygy

by gin_eater



Series: M-∑ Relation [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Autism Spectrum, Body Horror, Comic Book Science, Denial of Feelings, Existential Crises, F/M, Healing Sex, Hurt/Comfort, Ireland, Mental Instability, Mild Kidnapping, Mutual Pining, Psychological Trauma, Tessaractic Fallacies, inaccurate medicine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:55:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 48,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22072120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: "In Gnosticism, syzygy is a divine active-passive, male-female pair of aeons, complementary to one another rather than oppositional; they comprise the divine realm of the Pleroma (the totality of God's powers), and in themselves characterize aspects of the unknowable Gnostic God."Sequel to Monogamy of Entanglement: the loop that would have seen Drs. O'Deorain and de Kuiper reunited finally closes, nine years late and with many more complications than anticipated.
Relationships: Moira O'Deorain/Sigma | Siebren de Kuiper
Series: M-∑ Relation [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579798
Comments: 92
Kudos: 123





	1. Came Back Haunted

_I._

_I come from fields of fractured ice,_   
_Whose wounds are cured by squeezing,_   
_Melting they cool, but in a trice,_   
_Get warm again by freezing._   
_Here, in the frosty air, the sprays_   
_With fern-like hoar-frost bristle,_   
_There, liquid stars their watery rays_   
_Shoot through the solid crystal._

_II._

_I come from empyrean fires—_   
_From microscopic spaces,_   
_Where molecules with fierce desires,_   
_Shiver in hot embraces._   
_The atoms clash, the spectra flash,_   
_Projected on the screen,_   
_The double D, magnesian b,_   
_And Thallium’s living green._

_III._

_We place our eye where these dark rays_   
_Unite in this dark focus,_   
_Right on the source of power we gaze,_   
_Without a screen to cloak us._   
_Then, where the eye was placed at first,_   
_We place a disc of platinum,_   
_It glows, it puckers! will it burst?_   
_How ever shall we flatten him!_

_IV._

_This crystal tube the electric ray_   
_Shows optically clean,_   
_No dust or haze within, but stay!_   
_All has not yet been seen._   
_What gleams are these of heavenly blue?_   
_What air-drawn form appearing,_   
_What mystic fish, that, ghostlike, through_   
_The empty space is steering?_

_V._

_I light this sympathetic flame,_   
_My faintest wish that answers,_   
_I sing, it sweetly sings the same,_   
_It dances with the dancers._   
_I shout, I whistle, clap my hands,_   
_And stamp upon the platform,_   
_The flame responds to my commands,_   
_In this form and in that form._

_VI._

_What means that thrilling, drilling scream,_   
_Protect me! 'tis the siren:_   
_Her heart is fire, her breath is steam,_   
_Her larynx is of iron._   
_Sun! dart thy beams! in tepid streams,_   
_Rise, viewless exhalations!_   
_And lap me round, that no rude sound_   
_May mar my meditations._

_VII._

_Here let me pause.—These transient facts,_   
_These fugitive impressions,_   
_Must be transformed by mental acts,_   
_To permanent possessions._   
_Then summon up your grasp of mind,_   
_Your fancy scientific,_   
_Till sights and sounds with thought combine_   
_Become of truth prolific._

_VIII._

_Go to! prepare your mental bricks,_   
_Fetch them from every quarter,_   
_Firm on the sand your basement fix_   
_With best sensation mortar._   
_The top shall rise to heaven on high—_   
_Or such an elevation,_   
_That the swift whirl with which we fly_   
_Shall conquer gravitation._

\--James Clerk Maxwell, To the Chief Musician Upon Nabla: A Tyndallic Ode

* * *

Σ: Sigma. Eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, numerically valued at 200. Serpentine in shape and sound; etymologically descended from a root verb meaning "to hiss." Used most commonly among mathematical disciplines as the symbol denotive of the summation operator of an equation, although Moira knows the word best as the name of the strongest type of covalent chemical bond, and a handful of various transmembrane proteins.

She doubts, however, that Akande's requested her presence in Venice for the sake of a refresher course in secondary school biochemistry, and so she opens the file that Sombra's just slid over to her from across the conference table, upon which the symbol is written.

Some people hold that memory and projection are organic forms of time travel, and indeed Moira finds herself, for the space of a single heartbeat, ten years younger and seated at a different table, with the seeds of a fig rich and sandy on her tongue, smiling at the way her companion's broad hands cradle the air as he speaks, as if he needs to catch and examine his own words in order to verify that they match up with the ones in his mind.

"Doctor Siebren de Kuiper," she manages, somehow, to say without an identical hitch in her voice. "I thought he was dead."

"You and the rest of the world," says Sombra, leaning back in her chair. She starts to kick her heels up on the table, but then looks at Akande, and changes her mind. "Turns out he did more than just survive his little accident on the ISS, too -- he came back a changed man. Like, bitten by a radioactive black hole kind of changed."

Moira doesn't respond, flipping as she is through the pages that document those very changes. Acute psychosis, visual and auditory hallucinations, mania…gravitational fluctuations? Psychokinetic phenomena? What on Earth…?

"Doctor O'Deorain?"

She looks up, and realizes Akande has been speaking to her.

"Sorry?" she says, sounding not the least bit apologetic.

"I said I want you and Sombra to take a team to Ingolstadt and oversee the good doctor's transference to a Talon facility. I want you to assess him personally, both physically and psychologically. I want to know what happened to him, and more importantly, whether or not _he_ can happen for _us._ Do you understand?"

Moira glowers at him. "Don't speak to me like one of the cannon fodder, Akande. You know I understand perfectly."

Akande raises his hands as if to say he meant no offense, but he looks mollified by the assurance nonetheless.

"How long will you need to prepare?"

"Give me tonight to better familiarize myself with the file, and two days to assemble whatever I feel I may need."

He nods, and turns his attention to Sombra, who shrugs.

"Works for me."

Another nod. "Thursday, then. A dropship will be ready at twenty-two hundred hours in Otranto Hangar. I want this quick, clean, and discreet as you can manage. The European Space Administration, the Dutch and German governments, they've kept all knowledge of this man under lock and key for the better part of a decade; I would not have that ace slip from our sleeve before we get the chance to play it."

Sombra shoots him a winning grin. "Don't worry, boss. Discreta was my second choice for a name, if Sombra had already been taken."

Akande's affect is as flat as his voice. "I'm sure. That's all for now."

Thus excused, Moira and Sombra leave the briefing room and head for the elevator that will carry them back up to the areas of the former Bartalotti estate that are situated above sea-level.

"We finally get to have some fun together, ay doc?" Sombra chirps, and Moira makes a noncommittal noise of acknowledgment, wishing the younger woman was as quiet as she is clever.

It's not that she dislikes Sombra -- the hacker possesses too many of the qualities Moira most admires in a person to ever fully earn her contempt -- but the woman could try the patience of Saint Francis if she felt so inclined, and Moira is about as far from sainthood as the heavens are wide.

"Oh, here--" Sombra hands over a flash drive plucked from the pouch of her neon purple hoodie. "The supplementals on our new favorite astrophysicist, plus some mission specs -- where they're holding him, entry and exit points, guard locations, shift changes, the usual. I have a few ideas, but we can hash out strategy tomorrow. You're not claustrophobic, are you?"

Moira sighs. "No."

"Just checking. You wouldn't believe how many people are these days. I knew kids growing up who couldn't even sleep if the door was closed. So much rubble everywhere, you know?"

Moira parrots Akande's "I'm sure," and hopes her disinterest will be likewise accepted. Member of the Inner Council or not, Sombra doesn't defer to anyone the way she does to Doomfist. Moira truly doesn't give a damn what manner of nest Sombra's feathering for herself under Talon's trough, as long as it doesn't interfere with her own research, just as Vialli was content to humor her occasional little "slip-ups," provided they weren't financially deleterious; Akande, on the other hand, has a Philosophy, and the ice is thinner there. The returns he seeks on his investments are things that even their little shadow cannot hack -- at least, not without a strong stomach and access to a battle-ax or a bone saw. Sombra is wise not to push his buttons anymore than she can help herself.

Moira's buttons, however, are comparatively up for grabs. Bribery is sometimes effective, usually in the form of food, with baked goods having the greatest payoff in terms of time between annoyances, but she's only two hours off her plane from Oasis, and hasn't yet had time enough to prepare anything more ambitious than a cup of tea.

Luckily, their quarters are in separate wings of the palatial compound, and Sombra doesn't contrive a reason to follow when they separate at the split in the landing midway up the main staircase. The file weighs more heavily in Moira's hand with every step she takes, and it's a relief to drop it on her desk once she reaches the relative privacy of her rooms.

He's alive.

One would think she would be old hat at taking such resurrections in stride by now, but it feels like her hands are inside a covered box, and she's meant to guess what it contains by touch alone, only every ridge and bump and corner gets lost in the labyrinth between her fingers and her brain, and she can't make sense of the shape of the thing.

He's alive, not in the casket they buried in Leiden on Dutch television, while his estranged widow wept vacuous tears that had made Moira wish she could likewise drain the life out of the woman from eight hundred kilometers away.

He's alive, and in two days Moira is going to get him and he'll be standing in front of her, living breathing talking _being,_ tangible -- _touchable_ \-- solid and warm.

She slumps into the chair behind her desk, and for a few minutes simply sits there, dumbfounded, knowing what she's meant to do but almost farcically perplexed as to how she's supposed to go about doing it.

_Jesus wept, **think** , O'Deorain, for the love of-- …All right. All right. First things first: open the file._

For the second time, she flips over the manila cover, and swallows at the sight of the sharply-hewn face that stares up at her from above his facility intake form.

_Subject: Σ_   
_Name: De Kuiper, Siebren_   
_Date of Birth: 15 March 2014_   
_Height: 206 cm_   
_Weight: 100.7 kg_   
_Date of Admission: 30 April 2067_   
_Threat Level: Maximum_

Moira runs a finger over the picture clipped to the page, and wonders how recently it was taken. His cheeks look thinner than she remembers, and his dark hair that had been distinguishedly silvering at the temples has been shorn down to the skin. His eyebrows, at least, remain unchanged, just as thick and angular as they had been ten years ago, but the eyes beneath them, those are different -- still the same violet-gray, but glazed and empty, with the pinpoint pupils telltale of heavy sedation.

"What have they done to you?" she murmurs to herself, certain that whatever it was, it was the wrong thing, no matter how he came back. She's not surprised to find his autism absent from the list of his pre-existing conditions, of which there is only one -- minor bilateral glenohumeral osteoarthritis, which, according to his last physical before his final shuttle flight, inexplicably seemed to have corrected itself.

In fact, upon his return, he was in miraculously sound condition for having been subjected to gravitational oscillations far beyond what a human being should have been able tolerate, even momentarily. He'd suffered from seizures in the immediate aftermath, and been riddled with stress fractures and deep, body-wide contusions; his saliva and perspiration had vaporized, as in a vacuum, scalding his mouth and underarms, but his eyes, although brutally discolored by subconjunctival hemorrhages, had been spared similar burns, suggesting he'd had them closed at the time of exposure, and his lungs hadn't burst, so he must have been exhaling.

Eyes closed, and mouth open. Moira wonders if he hadn't survived by the skin of his own screams.

Still, it could have been -- by all accounts, _should_ have been -- much, much worse. He might have returned to Earth a jar full of crisped pink pulp; instead, a mere fortnight spent in a barbiturate coma within the pressurized, nanite-infused atmosphere of a hyperbaric biotank saw him physically right as rain again: swelling reduced, bruises faded, burns peeled, and bones knitted together even denser and sturdier than before.

His endurance was a total mystery. His CBC and BMP panels had been, aside from the expected trauma markers, perfect, his tox-screen negative, and--

...Oh.

Moira freezes for a moment, and then sits back in her chair.

Holy God. Holy _shit._

"The prototype."

_Siebren's hotel room looked scarcely used in comparison to hers. The bed, unslept in since the night before last, was still turned down from that morning's maid service, and where Moira tended toward organized chaos, tossing her belongings hither and yon as she used and discarded them, he was neat almost to the point of compulsion, with everything placed at precise angles and equally distanced from its fellows. She wondered if he was tidying the explosion of clothing that littered her floor while he waited for her to return, and the quaint domesticity of the thought made her smile._

_Her reason for being there enabled her to browse a little, and so she did, idly curious about the everyday debris of his life -- what brand of antiperspirant he preferred (generic; unscented), the color of his toothbrush (white and blue), whether he shaved with an electric razor or a manual one (manual -- a pleasantly surprising old-fashioned straight razor). She found a pair of goggles and swim jammers hanging on the towel rack in the bathroom, confirming her suspicions of his aquatic athleticism, and folded beside his suitcase, a plain white undershirt and a pair of gray ESA-branded joggers that probably served as pyjamas._

_She would have liked to see him in those -- the shirt fitting snug across his broad frame and the joggers slung low on his narrow, well-defined hips. The mental image alone made her nipples peak against the thin fabric of her shirt. Next time, perhaps -- if there was a next time, she reminded herself._

_Moving on to the tiny closet, she ran her fingers over the suit he'd worn the first day of the symposium, and she held the soft, finespun wool jacket to her face to breathe in the scent of him again. His cologne was in the bathroom, she recalled, next to his shave kit, and she spritzed it on, and made a mental note of its name and designer, thinking she might purchase a bottle for herself -- she favored masculine fragrances, anyway, and the idea of being able to smell him whenever she wanted was a tantalizing prospect, indeed._

_Finally, she got what she came for -- a clean pair of trousers and one of boxer-briefs -- and swiped a pen and a piece of hotel stationery from the desk before making one last stop in the bathroom._

_She retrieved the small amber bottle of luminescently golden capsules she'd pocketed before leaving her own room, set it down on the counter beside his cologne, and scrawled a quick note that she tucked beneath both:_

_For the next time you're feeling reckless. --M★_

Probably he'd been taking them sporadically throughout the course of the mission, which was what Moira had intended, to help offset the physiological stressors -- muscle atrophy, edema, and the like -- of long-term spaceflight. But the formula wasn't that potent -- theoretically, at least; he might have doubled up on the dose that day, or perhaps it had interacted with some unaccounted-for quirk in his physiology. Still, for it to have built up in his system to the extent that he could withstand being partially digested by a _black hole,_ of all things... Now, perhaps, with the advancements she's made in manipulating cellular structures, but then? When she'd yet to even work out the anomaly that had enabled the results her peers had initially dismissed as either a misidentified reaction or out-and-out sensationalistic lies?

Then again, it had been he who'd cracked open the egg of her epiphany, in the course of their conversation regarding the reflective nature of the universe itself: a black hole gene, he'd suggested -- idly, jokingly, but while her genetic translation of the concept was more poetic than direct, Gabriel and, to a lesser degree, Moira herself now represent the ravenous proof in that shadowy pudding. Permeated with its antidote as de Kuiper had been at the time, Moira must at least credit the possibility that some form of cosmically-recognized aposematism might have occurred, or at any rate that her contribution had in a sense rendered him unpalatable enough to have been spat out upon tasting.

But while her little souvenir might to some extent account for his survival, it didn't even begin to explain what else he'd been proven capable of upon his return.

Following his emergency evacuation back to Earth, the unconscious de Kuiper had been airlifted directly from the CRV landing site to a military hospital in Darmstadt, where the ISS crew's medical doctor relayed his care to a Bundeswehr physician by the name of Elias Epelman.

Once de Kuiper had been stabilized, his treatment progressed apace, and he'd healed with remarkable speed, until the only question mark that remained was that of his mental function. Imaging showed his cerebral structure to be intact, with no persisting inflammation, but in the end, of course, only de Kuiper himself, through his conscious judgments and reactions and ability to perform as requested, could provide the information necessary to make that diagnosis one way or the other.

And so, they woke him up, and then it was days before the hospital's custodial staff finally finished picking pieces of metal, bone and tissue out of the ceiling.

Only the damaged memory chip of Epelman's omnic assistant, Johannes, exists to provide a first-hand account of the incident, a copy of which Moira finds on Sombra's flash drive.

The video lacks any audio, and it glitches every few seconds, like a satellite signal corrupted by a solar flare, but the picture, for the most part, is clear:

The omnic Johannes stands at the foot of de Kuiper's hospital bed, with Epelman and two human nurses flanking it on either side. The left-hand nurse is the one to administer a syringe of methylphenidate into the IV attached to de Kuiper's right forearm, and in less than a minute, his eyelids begin to flutter, and the muscles in his arms and hands to twitch to life in a vaguely Frankensteinian progression, stilted and eerie. His heart rate on the ECG jumps from thirty-five to forty-seven beats per minute -- fifty -- sixty-two…

Moira has witnessed more than her share of fear, often being, if not the direct cause of it herself, then immediately adjacent to whomever is, but she's never seen fear the like of which emanates from de Kuiper's eyes upon their opening. It's sheer, primordial panic, something siphoned from the eldritch source of whatever was one indrawn breath older than the first scream, and gooseflesh rises on Moira's arms and the nape of her neck to see it.

Seventy-eight. Ninety.

The bed begins to rise, and those assembled take a collective step back. Epelman adapts first, the phenomenon secondary to the wellbeing of his patient. It's not uncommon for people to experience nightmares as they emerge from anesthesia, and when Epelman speaks, the articulations of his mouth are clear and slow with calming intent.

It doesn't work -- appears, rather, to make things worse. De Kuiper thrashes, pain joining the fear when Epelman and his subordinates seek to pin his flailing limbs, his neck cording and face contorting as he twists his head against the pillow, shouting soundlessly, arching off the mattress.

One hundred eleven. One hundred twenty-three.

The video lurches as Johannes…falls? --No, rises: he's horizontal now, but everything is rising that isn't in some way attached to a wall or the floor. One of the nurses vomits at the sudden, dizzying shift in equilibrium, while the other struggles to reach the door, only to be sucked backward as the room -- or rather, everything _except_ the room -- begins to spin.

Some sort of gravitational vortex is forming, with de Kuiper floating fetal at its center, his mouth open in a scream, clutching his head in his hands. The bed whirls like a propeller beneath him, increasing in velocity with every rotation; the IV rips out of his arm, and the ECG flatlines and flashes in alarm when its wires yank free of the electrodes adhered to his chest.

Moira watches Johannes' arm reach out to grab hold of the sink, watches his joints spark and separate before the stainless steel basin and the counter around it give way as easily as aluminum and corrugated fiberboard. She startles when the corner of the crash cart smashes into the back of Epelman's head, and great, warping globules of blood and brain matter join the maelstrom of equipment, bodies, and bile reeling rapidly around the axis of the agonized man in middle of the room.

The video glitches hard as Johannes is slammed abruptly into the floor, and then resolves into an image of the nurse who'd vomited lying parallel some two meters away, likely already dead, her head having hit the tile with enough force to partially extricate her left eye from its socket.

Both are down for only a second before the image blurs again in a rapid ascent, and goes dark.

Moira stares past her own reflection in the screen for some time, uncertain of how to process what she's just watched.

There is, of course, the curiosity, adrenalized and simmering just beneath her skin, as is expected and appropriate to what she knows of herself when presented with a scientific treasure trove of this magnitude, but she finds it tempered by a prevailing sensation of numbness -- of having been, furtively and without warning, detached from herself and placed in stasis, like a transplant organ on ice between bodies.

As a scientist, Moira regards the notion of deity with no small amount of skepticism, but as a cradle Catholic, the threat of divine punishment factored more than frequently enough in her upbringing to have an overarching impact on her worldview. She doesn't believe that the God of her childhood is anything more than the dummy of three thousand years' worth of tyrannical ventriloquists, but neither can she say that, in weaker moments, she's never wondered if something hadn't specifically taken its due for her exploitation of the loophole she found in the laws of entropy by robbing her of the person whose perspective enabled her to understand what it was that she'd stumbled across. That he happened to also be the only person who'd ever made her genuinely reconsider everything she'd thought she'd known of her own capacity for human connection was just the ironic icing on the whole spiteful cake.

She can't tell whether the revelation of his continuing existence makes the scar of losing him and the possibilities he represented feel less or more like the wound it had been; can't tell whether it's a mercy or a cruelty that he's been returned to her thus, now, with his gifts to be utilized as a weapon, just as she utilizes the gift he unwittingly gave to her.

_"I feel like all of me is safe with you," he said, and perhaps it was that the bubble of their time together was thinning, creating a sense of urgency that lent the confession greater significance than he'd meant it to carry, but the words snaked uninvited between her ribs and coiled around her heart and she **wanted** \--_

No. Damn it, _no._ She's already mourned that loss -- had spent the night she and de Kuiper were to have met again instead getting scathingly, appallingly blackout drunk beside Jesse cunting McCree at a tiki bar in Tortuga, and then hidden her sobs in the painful heaves that had forced her to her knees in front of the toilet the next morning. She'd stared at herself in the mirror after, hands fisted and knuckles white, eyes bloodshot and swollen, and told herself that it was _done,_ he was _gone,_ and with vivisectional ferocity she'd sliced what little she possessed of the otiose fat of sentiment from her own hard, determined, pitiless lean.

She's tempted now to repeat the experience, but she leaves the bottle of whiskey in its place in the bottom-left drawer of her desk, and lights a cigarette instead -- a habit she'd quit in her twenties, only to take it up again when she began with Blackwatch, knowing it couldn't cause her lungs or skin any damage beyond her ability to undo. For fuck's sake, she's pushing fifty and isn't yet so much as perimenopausal; outside the loose parameters that define adulthood, she is effectively ageless -- not immortal, not yet, but there's nothing to indicate she won't live to reach at least her bicentennial, if she manages somehow to carry on as she has been.

She's good at it, the carrying on; she does so now, going through the motions of research as she would for any other project, rarefied or mundane.

There are other videos -- hundreds, in fact; weekly "therapy" sessions, according to Sombra's notes. They're far too numerous to get through in the time Moira has before de Kuiper's retrieval, but a skimming of the oldest and most recent files, with a few in between, should provide a general impression of any alterations in his personality or behavior over time.

She takes a long, hard drag from her cigarette, as if to smoke the hive of her mind and its swarming thoughts into docility, and clicks on the first file: _Sigma20670501._

It's immediately apparent that the facility to which he's been transferred learned from Epelman's mistakes: de Kuiper sits alone in a large, empty room, strapped to a chair that's been bolted to the floor. His orange institutional jumpsuit clashes with the sickly mint green of the walls, and his bare feet are curled so that only the tips of his halluces touch the smooth, cold-looking concrete floor. He's also drugged out of his gourd, if the way his head lolls is any indication, although he is conscious -- his eyes are heavy, but open, and he's stimming in the only way currently available to him, sawing the blunt edges of his thumbnails against the pads of his index fingers.

There's a red ball on the floor about a meter in front of him, a budget-friendly child's plaything pulling double-duty as a scientific apparatus.

"How are you feeling today, Doctor de Kuiper?" a male voice -- that of a Dr. Otto Traugott -- pipes through a set of unseen speakers, and bounces off the bare walls of the room.

De Kuiper winces, and Traugott prompts him again, "Doctor de Kuiper?"

De Kuiper opens his mouth, closes it, shakes his head.

"I don't…" he says, voice halfway sticking in his throat. He swallows and struggles to focus, to rally. "What?"

"How are you feeling today?"

"I, ah… Could...could you turn that down, please?"

"Turn what down? My voice?"

"The music."

"There is no music, Doctor de Kuiper."

The man in the video lifts his head, squinting, confused.

"Can't you hear it?" he asks. "It's deafening."

"No, I can't hear it. Can you describe it for me?"

"I don't… I can't place it. It's familiar but it's... What is that melody?"

His lips move, presumably along with whatever he's hearing, but the tune remains as trapped in his throat as it is in his head, and after a few moments, Traugott redirects him:

"Do you remember what happened aboard the International Space Station?"

De Kuiper blinks once, hard, and his eyes follow the path of an unseen object. "What happened…?" he repeats, distracted.

"Yes. Aboard the space station."

"I… I was there to conduct a series of experiments, but I… H-how did I get back?"

"You were evacuated. You were quite severely injured when the artificial black hole you engineered experienced a brief period of…instability."

"Instability? No, that's not… I need to see the data. I need to--" He grunts, having tried to stand, and looks bemusedly down at his bonds, as if this is the first he's seen of them. "What--? Wh-- Where am I? Why am I being imprisoned? Release me!"

Moira's attention is drawn to a slight movement at the bottom of the screen: the red ball is no longer on the floor, but hovering just above it, spinning like a basketball on the tip of an invisible finger.

"I'm afraid that is impossible," Traugott's voice calmly intones.

"You have no right to hold me, I've done nothing wrong!"

"I am afraid, Doctor de Kuiper, that simply isn't true. You've killed four people."

The ball jumps higher, spins faster, but if de Kuiper notices it, he doesn't relate its movements back to his own mounting agitation.

"What? No! No, I-- There's been some kind of mistake, I would never--"

"There is no mistake, Doctor de Kuiper. You killed four people. A doctor, two nurses, and a physician's assistant. Whether you were in control of your actions at the time is immaterial; they are dead, and you are the cause of it."

 _Devil choke you, whoreson bastard,_ Moira thinks, burning away the ache in her chest and throat at the horrified disbelief in de Kuiper's expression with another lungful of smoke, knowing exactly the nightmare scenario Traugott's ham-fisted words must trigger in his mind: that he was wrong; that his faith in his understanding of his own condition was entirely misplaced; that his brain short-circuited at the most crucial moment, and others paid the ultimate price for his hubris.

That Traugott is incognizant of how utterly his vagueness has just decimated his patient's -- his prisoner's -- sense of self is as immaterial as de Kuiper's ignorance of having committed multiple manslaughter. Akande's desire for discretion be damned, if Moira finds this man at the facility, she will kill him for that callous stupidity alone, as slowly and spectacularly as time will allow.

"No," de Kuiper says again, but the confidence in his voice is a pittance of what it was, and the ball is…beating, expanding and contracting rapidly as the air pressure vacillates within and around it. Moira wonders if its pulses reflect his heart rate, wonders if his vitals are being monitored by sensors hidden beneath his jumpsuit, and she pages through the file for the relevant charts while he continues to protest, "No, this isn't right -- I should have a lawyer, I should... Where am I being held? Who the hell are you people?"

"Calm yourself, Doctor de Kuiper. You are not in any danger."

"Like hell! You, you lock me up and you pump me full of God knows what and that -- that fucking _music_ and I can't, c-can't-- God stop it please-- Please it hurts, _het doet pijn,_ it'stooloudithurts--"

"Doctor de Kuiper."

Moira stills, file forgotten, eyes riveted to the screen.

De Kuiper whimpers, hunching, his breathing tight and shallow with pain. Tears pearl around his lashes without shedding, just as blood collects in the conchae of his ears and remains there, rippling roundly, adhered by the surface tension characteristic of fluids in a microgravity environment.

The ball is fluctuating wildly now, inflating to the verge of bursting, crumpling until it resembles a large plug of cherry chewing gum.

"Doctor de Kuiper."

A loud crack, like a gunshot, reverberates throughout the anemic green room as the ball's structural integrity finally fails, leaving it a star-shaped scrap of plastic pinwheeling in the air.

The soft, distinctive hiss of a hypospray -- probably embedded somewhere in the back of the chair, if Moira had to guess -- precedes both its fall and that of de Kuiper's blood and tears as he slumps, unconscious, against his bonds.

The video ends, and it's only when the long cylinder of ash Moira's cigarette has become breaks and falls against her keyboard that she jerks back to the present, cursing and blowing the residue from between the keys, and stubbing the filter in an empty glass Petri dish she's taken to using as a paperweight.

Flustered, she looks again at the file, but the paper may as well be oiled for the way the words slip through the grate between her eyes and her mind, and so she tosses it aside with a frustrated sigh, pushes a hand back through her hair, and selects another video at random.

The setup is the same: green walls, orange jumpsuit, straps and chair, but the red ball has been replaced with a semicircle of soft toys -- a sheep, a crocodile, a tortoise, a rainbow-banded snake, and a blue hippopotamus all bob gently in the air around him, mocking and surreal.

De Kuiper himself looks diminished, thinner, and his eyes are bruised and hollow with exhaustion. He doesn't even stim, his hands lying limp against the armrests of the chair.

"How are you feeling today, Doctor?" Traugott's voice begins.

The man in the chair is slow to answer, as if speech is a thing that can only be achieved once his thoughts have built up sufficient inertia.

"Better," he says, and Moira bites down on a foil of anger at the thought of what "worse" must have looked like.

"I'm glad to hear that. The orderlies tell me that your behavior has also improved over the past few days. Do you see how the one thing informs the other?"

"C…cause and effect," de Kuiper agrees, nodding as if unaware he's being condescended to like some idiot child. "Yes, I see."

"And the Melody -- has that, too, been improving?"

De Kuiper shudders, tries to hide it in a shrug.

" _Yes,_ " he says, too loudly and too quickly. "Yes it's. Quiet. It's quieter now." He inhales shakily, and his facial muscles tic into a desperate, faltering parody of a smile.

"Good."

"Yes!" The animals jump, and de Kuiper startles, quailing down into his restraints. "Yes it's good yes," he whispers as they sink again -- the beginnings of control, Moira wonders, or does he believe their movements correlate to some unknown agent external to himself? The red ball didn't pop until his ears were bleeding; if his mysterious Melody truly is quieter now, he may view the props as barometers of its volume, and not of his distress in response to it.

"A little wound up today, are we?" Traugott asks. "Is there perhaps something on your mind?"

De Kuiper swallows with some difficulty, and there's a sense that he's been preparing for this, rehearsing for it.

"Yes I-- I've been… It's quiet and I've been. I was hoping. I need to be there," he says. "Please. Please. She's expecting me. The Star."

Moira's heart does a strange, hot turn in her chest, and her eyes flick to the date in the file name: _Sigma20670808_. 

One year exactly from the night they'd met.

He'd remembered.

He'd been shattered, body and mind; he was being held against his will, sentenced without trial, with his mental faculties reduced to a psychotic roux of haloperidol and post-traumatic hallucinations, and still he'd remembered, and wanted to go to her.

Wonderful man. 

Damaged, devastating, wonderful man.

"A star is expecting you?" Traugott's tone all but oozes skeptical amusement, and his death moves swiftly and smoothly up the rungs of Moira's designative ladder, from Potentially Diverting Side Quest to Requisite Mission Objective, even if she has to go entirely out of everyone's way to see it done.

De Kuiper nods. "The Prettiest Star. We, we, we have a loop, we have a loop and if I'm not there then I can't -- can't _tell_ her."

"I see. And what do you have to tell her, Doctor, this pretty star of yours?"

" _Prettiest,_ " de Kuiper emphasises, and it makes Moira smile faintly even as it tightens the knot in her throat. "If you saw her, you'd see. Cold fire, red and blue -- like shifts in visible light, ultraviolet to infrared. That's how she knew. She's not like me but she is _where_ I am and I belong to her, to her on her in her with her. I _belong._ "

The other animals drift aimlessly, but the rainbow snake remains largely stationary, front and center, chasing its own tail in a bright, eternal ring.

"A noble sentiment," Traugott assures him, "but if she is where you are, then why can't you simply tell her that here?"

Moira supposes she should feel relieved that Traugott fails to understand the allegorical nature of his patient's ramblings. How loathsome it would be if he did, and dangled the promise of her like a carrot on a stick to ensure his subject's cooperation. She hopes de Kuiper is aware of that much -- that he doesn't use her name because he doesn't want Traugott to know who she is, and not because he's forgotten that she has one.

Still, his frustration at Traugott's obtuseness is made evident by the snake, which loses sight of its tail as it spirals up into an adder dance with a phantom opponent.

"No!" he snarls. "You're not _listening!_ You never hear anything, you stupid man! Just let me go! I'm better, I'm-- It's _good,_ I've been good, I have to be there, let me go!"

The animals are all facing the camera now, their lifeless eyes staring flatly into the lens in a tableau as ridiculous as it is menacing.

Traugott is silent, probably out of petulance at the slight to his intelligence as much as an unwillingness to reward negative behavior with engagement.

"Hello?" de Kuiper calls. "I know you're there! Release me, damn you! _Please!_ Please?"

The hypospray hisses, the animals fall, the video cuts to black, and Moira...

Moira _seethes._

She opens the encrypted texting app on her phone and fires off a short message:

_A dozen conchas if Mr. Traugott can be given a reason to look in on his patient Thursday night._

Sombra's reply is almost immediate: _A baker's dozen, and you got yourself a deal._

She doesn't ask for an explanation, nor does Moira expect she ever will, although the request has doubtless piqued her interest enough that she'll nose around for the why of it on her own time, if she doesn't already know. No matter -- it doesn't amount to much on paper, and if she takes it to anyone, it will be Gabriel, who might actually enjoy having the opportunity to one-up her with the revelation that he's not only aware of Moira and de Kuiper's prior acquaintance, but having been surveiling Moira the night of their affair, was also treated to the dubious pleasure of observing its more exhibitionistic moments in greater detail than he might have wished.

Anyway, it's not as if the underpinnings of their little Mephistophelian empire aren't already rife with maudlin threats to its efficiency. Sombra herself can attest to that, what with the way she and Lacroix are constantly pulling at one another's metaphorical pigtails, and one need only make the vaguest of references to Jack Morrison within earshot of Gabriel to see what thirty years' worth of emotional constipation can accomplish for a person's resting bitch face.

 _Done,_ Moira sends, and rolls her eyes when she receives a string of drooling emojis in response.

If only Akande could be so easily persuaded, but in his case, it will be easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Moira's status as a shareholder on Talon's governing board is, technically, equal to Akande's own, and he respects the objectivity of her ambitions enough to give any modest dissent that might arise from her corner the benefit of the doubt in regard to her motivations being rooted in rational analysis, and not petty political power plays.

At least, she _thinks_ he does -- one can never be a hundred percent certain when dealing with paranoid, bloodthirsty warlords hell-bent on building worldwide totalitarian regimes -- but it's a chance she'll have to take.

That much decided, she picks up the file, able to make sense of it now that something like a plan is coalescing in the back of her mind, and she works deep into the night, reading, watching and cross-referencing, jotting down notes of her own.

De Kuiper doesn't mention her again, as the Star or anything else, and goes all but catatonic the one time Traugott ventures to bring it up. Moira never sees him strive for that level of subservience again, either, responding to Traugott's questions with alternating fury and defeat, if he answers them at all.

He does eventually seem to realize that the rotating array of toys that always surrounds him during his sessions move according to his mental state. In calmer moments, they simply drift, gently colliding and bouncing off of one another at random angles, like poly-filled asteroids; in more truculent moods, they spin, orbiting his chair like satellites, as the unfortunate Epelman and his team had done, albeit to considerably less gruesome effect.

Once or twice, their configuration is linear: they arrange themselves at differing heights before him, while de Kuiper's fingers press repetitively against the arms of his chair. Moira herself might have mistaken those small gestures for stimming behavior, or else a dyskinetic side effect of one of his medications, if the question of the Melody and her own remembrance of the musician's strength in his palms hadn't both been simultaneously skimming the surface of her thoughts. As it is, she would bet a very healthy sum that if Traugott ever thought to put some facsimile of a keyboard in front of him, he would find that the positions of the toys correspond notationally to the finger placements on a piano.

Of course, Traugott doesn't think to do that, and so Moira takes screenshots, and overlays them with cropped images of blank staff paper. She doesn't read music, and can't be certain where, exactly, the notes should fall, or how they should be played, but it gets the idea across well enough to be tailored later on.

De Kuiper's medical records reveal nothing especially out of the ordinary, save for frequent migraines (which surely aren't alleviated by the number of neuroleptics listed in his medication chart, none of which seem to have ever done his symptoms any good) and, appearing at about six months into his captivity, a vitamin D deficiency, for which he now receives ultraviolet phototherapy three times per week.

He's lost nearly twenty kilos, but his teeth are good, and there's no documented reoccurrence of the ruptured eardrums he suffered during his first session with Traugott -- an affliction written off as having been caused by a sudden change in air pressure, psychosomatically augmented by a false perception of auditory trauma.

Any imaging the facility has performed has come back clean, healthy, almost disappointingly normal: they've never been able to scan him while he's conscious, and so the regions of his brain involved in the use of his powers remain enigmas to be solved. One thing Moira does find curious isn't his brain itself, but the osteal case that surrounds it -- the sutures where his cranial bones would have fused in early childhood appear slightly thicker than usual, almost as if his head had at some point been broken apart at the seams, like a Beauchêne skull, and then fitted back together with such precision as to almost completely occlude any visual markers that the injury had ever taken place.

Also strange is the fact that his captors, frankly, haven't done anything with him. They test and retest him from a strictly diagnostic purview, and appear to have no real goals for him in mind beyond the maintenance of his tractability -- hence the toys, Moira thinks. They could use anything of adequate softness (or not, because it hardly matters that a velveteen rabbit has no sharp edges when the man to whom it's given can make it weigh a metric ton), anything at all to measure the range of his gravitic abilities, but a toy is a deliberate signifier of dependence -- how his keepers wish him to view himself in relation to the "care" he receives at their discretion.

His individuality, too, is stripped piecemeal from his and Traugott's interactions, as he goes from being Doctor de Kuiper, to Doctor, to nothing at all -- and then, just as gradually, to Sigma: first declarative, as the final word in a sentence of praise, and then questioning, prompting recognition of himself as such. He's never Siebren to him, not once, not ever, and Moira feels a twinge of guilt when she realizes he hasn't been Siebren to her in just as long, either, not that she can really be blamed for it -- keeping her distance from his memory had been a provisional matter upon their parting, but something more crucial to her sense of self-preservation in the wake of his alleged death.

She wonders if he still connects the name to himself, or if it's been locked away in some internal glacier, waiting for a thaw.

She closes her eyes and mouths it now, without sound -- a practice run, just as he had made of hers the first time he'd tried it on for size.

Siebren, dour and uncomfortable; Siebren, awkward and sweet and surprisingly cheeky; Siebren, brilliant and intense and open and tender and so, so strong…

Moira covers her eyes with a hand to cage the ache that perches just behind them, pecking at the backs of her tear ducts. She refuses to behave like this, like some pining fucking Penelope. It's beneath her. The man she knew is _dead_ \-- he might not have died but it's been ten fucking years and she doesn't know who or what might be wearing his face anymore; God knows she's no longer the woman he'd so badly wanted to see again, even without the benefit of coercive conditioning. She has killed, maimed, stolen, blackmailed, abused her own authority and undercut that of others, and she will keep doing all of those things and more, and with a smile on her face, because she enjoys them. She is a despicable fucking person and she feels just in being so, as just as any carrion crow that eats the eyes out of a dead lamb's head in front of its bleating dam, because life is not a benevolent gift: it's a process of elimination, and Moira is too damned resilient for anyone's good, her own included.

Akande wants a weapon, and she is obliged to give him one.

But not like this. Even if she didn't feel…the way she does, delivering to Doomfist a lunatic man-child he can simply point in any direction he believes could profit from a little chaos would be a waste of de Kuiper's potential. One doesn't yoke a thoroughbred like a beast of burden. Talon needs to know what he knows, and for that, he must be able to tell them -- must be able to discover it for himself, if he isn't already aware. He'll need the data from the mission and his experiments, he'll need a lab--

But she's getting ahead of herself. She must first ascertain how much of his mathematical genius remains intact, and whether he can be trusted with…with whatever he may need.

Moira messages her assistant in Oasis, and has him clear her calendar for the next month, citing a family emergency.

She has so much to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we have ignition! For what it's worth, I have thirteen sections loosely plotted out for this thus far, but there's never any telling how long they'll turn out to be or what tangents they'll collect along the way, and so the number of chapters will remain undecided until the Ending Doth Approach.
> 
> Chapter titles are song titles, because I'm trite and would inflict soundtracks on everything if I could. This one's by Nine Inch Nails. Probably I'll toss up a fanmix eventually.
> 
> Anyway, thank you for reading, and please remember to keep your arms and legs inside the fic until it's come to a complete stop; we have a very melodramatic road ahead of us...


	2. Subterranean Homesick Alien

_To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,_   
_All in the morning betime,_   
_And I a maid at your window,_   
_To be your Valentine._   
_Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,_   
_And dupp'd the chamber-door;_   
_Let in the maid, that out a maid_   
_Never departed more._

\--William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

* * *

The nameless facility just north of Ingolstadt began its life some ninety-odd years before Moira had even been born. Originally designed as a subterranean factory for the concealed manufacture of tanks and other armored vehicles during the Third Reich, it had seen the deaths of almost as many slave laborers in its construction and maintenance as those caused by the thousands of war machines it had churned out over the three years it was operational.

It had sat, more or less abandoned, for nearly a century before being repurposed as a POW bunker at the advent of the Omnic Crisis, being one of the few already extant structures capable of containing the type of prisoners Null Sector had a habit of producing. A few of them are rumored to still be there, lurking within the designations between Alpha and Epsilon, but Akande generally favors fresh blood -- or coolant, as the case may be -- and has no immediate use for the outdated models of the old guard. Later, perhaps, if only to sow a little psychological discord on both sides, but the acquisition of Subject Sigma is too valuable to risk the attention a mass breakout would almost undoubtedly incur.

Besides, they'd need a hell of a lot more firepower to accomplish such a feat. The place is a fifty-acre fortress of reinforced concrete tunnels some three meters thick, and its only unguarded point of entry is a ventilation tube ninety meters long but only fifty centimeters in diameter.

_"There is no conceivable way he is fitting through that," Moira said at the strategy meeting the day before. "His shoulders alone must be sixty."_

_Sombra frowned and pursed her lips. "What if we squished him a little?"_

_"Oh, yes, of course, we'll just fold him down the middle like a -- a taco!"_

_"Really? A taco joke for the Mexican girl? --I'm **kidding** ," Sombra said quickly, when Moira opened her mouth to speak again. "Don't get your shillelagh in a wad. It's just the getting in that's the tricky part. Once I've interfaced with their network, we can leave out any door we want. I'm thinking here, the east side freight elevator…"_

She was, at least, no more blasé than Gabriel had ever been before a mission, although at the moment, strapped into the drop ship as they cross from Austrian into German airspace, she reminds Moira more of McCree: the very picture of nonchalance in the face of imminent violence, tapping at some candy-colored match-three game on a small hard light screen projecting from one of her many cybernetic implants. McCree had preferred solitaire, and with real playing cards, but the effect is the same. Had Widowmaker been with them, she would fall into place as the Genji of their operation, dismal and contained.

 _The more things change…_ Moira sighs to herself, settling back into her own pre-mission ritual, headset synced to her music library and brain as elsewhere as it can be. She doesn't dare listen to Bowie, but Queen isn't feeling particularly helpful right now, either. _I Want To Break Free. I'm Going Slightly Mad. Save Me._

At the opening riff of _Under Pressure,_ she huffs in disgust and switches to an instrumental EBM mix, ignoring Sombra's curious glance in favor of focusing on harmonizing her adrenaline to the music's propulsive rhythms and distorted, industrial-sounding synths. By the time their pilot informs them that they're two minutes out from the drop site, she's mostly managed to reach the mildly dissociative state that enables her to perform as necessary. Her right hand tingles with anticipation, and she suppresses a shiver as the energy in her body loosens and shifts just enough to put her within easy reach of that twilit demimonde between atoms that allows her to bypass the main thoroughfares of time and space.

Beside her, Sombra exits out of her game, cracks her knuckles and neck, and gives her translocator beacons and machine pistol each a final check; then she yawns hugely, and flashes an easy grin at the trio of nameless Talon redshirts sitting stiffly across the aisle.

"Any of you guys ever been to the funny farm?" she asks them.

One of the men hesitantly raises his hand, and Moira resists the impulse to roll her eyes. Mercenaries and madmen; it's a wonder they ever get anything done at all.

They set down dark a little more than a kilometer to the west of the pipeline, in a clearing of the Bavarian forest, and crunch their way quickly through the duff by night vision, keeping parallel to the faint trail that leads around to the facility's main entrance. Meteorology is on their side tonight, an autumn drizzle helping to mask the noise of their footsteps through the leaf litter, and they make decent time, reaching the vent a little before midnight.

It looks about as inviting as a dark pit in a hillside can look, situated roughly one meter high and barred by a thick steel grating, but it's well-maintained, free of rust and with only a small amount of vegetal matter having collected around its rim, which bodes relatively well for the cramped journey to come. The trickiest bit will be the angles -- a thirty-three degree incline for twenty-five meters, an equally precipitous descent for sixty, and then one last, plummeting, five-meter drop through an identical grated portal on the other side.

Moira takes a preparatory breath and turns to the three expendables.

"Remember, you are here to monitor and divert. Under no circumstances are you to directly engage. If you are apprehended, you are to keep your gobs _shut_ and await retrieval. Understood?"

The last is a lie, of course -- the only resources Talon will waste in the event of their capture will be three bullets and a modest bribe to a prison guard with a southward-pointing moral compass. Really, she just wanted to bark at someone to quell her own unease, but the low chorus of affirmatives does predictably little to reassure her.

Steeling herself, she briskly unfastens and shrugs off her plasma reactor, holding it by its thick black central tube with one hand, and accepts two of Sombra's beacons in the other.

"See you on the other side, doc," says the hacker, and in an inky flare of violet light, Moira fades, her cells dispersing like thirty-seven trillion microscopic flies all caught in a web of dark energy.

In the blink of an eye, she passes through the grating and as far up the pipe as she's willing to hazard with limited vision and precious little room for error, rematerializing about ten meters into the first twenty-five, stretched out prostrate with Sombra's and her own equipment before her.

Taking a moment to orientate herself, she's dimly surprised to find that maybe she is a little claustrophobic, after all, because it's the effort of several deep, slow breaths to ease the sudden, choking tightness in her chest that accompanies the awareness of being only a few centimeters from the crushing weight of many thousands of tons of earth on all sides.

She comforts herself with the dubious stereotype that if there's anything the Germans could be trusted with a century ago, it was engineering, and the more indisputable fact that there are far worse black holes to fall into, as their mission objective can certainly attest.

She's fine. She's covered in cobwebs and already perspiring like a priest at a playground, but she's fine, and she relays as much to Sombra as she affixes one of her colleague's beacons to the side of the chute.

"I'll let you know when I'm clear of it," she says over their comm link, and then begins the strenuous crawl, inching forward with caterpillar-like undulations, heralded by the scrape of her plasma reactor against the concrete as she pushes it along in front of her.

When she judges herself to be a good three meters past the beacon, she gives Sombra the go-ahead, and shuts her eyes against the brief flash of light that fills the tunnel and signals the younger woman's arrival behind her -- as does the string of Spanish expletives (most of them aimed at Akande and his antecedents, as far as Moira can tell) that follows, as Sombra herself adjusts to the suddenly close quarters.

"Are you all right?" Moira asks when she seems to have finished.

There's a few seconds of scuffling noises, peppered with grunts of exertion, and then punctuated by a petulant sigh.

"Regretting a few key life choices," Sombra finally replies, "but other than that, I'm fucking peachy. This place reeks of rat shit, let's go."

Go they do, arduously, and at snail's pace. Moira's bathed in sweat by the time they reach the final drop-off, the muscles in her arms and legs shaking from the constant tension that owes just as much to anxiety as it does physical labor, but there's light at the end of the tunnel, literally, and something that could almost be called a breeze pulls up through the grated portal a handful of meters below.

She waits until she feels Sombra's tap at her ankle, letting her know she's right behind, and then pulls herself headfirst over the edge of the chute and fades all the way down to the comparatively open air of the narrow corridor below, landing solid and silent, right hand brandished defensively, in a low crouch on the sealed concrete floor.

She's still for a moment, scanning, listening, but the hall is empty and quiet save for a few distant, wretched moans.

She activates the second translocator, and Sombra bursts into existence beside her a second later, equally sweaty and exhaling harshly in relief.

" _Madre de Dios,_ " Sombra grumbles, dusting herself off with one hand and hacking the facility's network through the cables running the length of the ceiling above their heads with the other, downloading door codes, disabling overrides, and looping security feeds. "Not that getting to look at your ass for the better part of an hour was a chore or anything, but this guy better be worth it."

"He will be," Moira promises, shouldering her reactor once more and pretending not to register the quirk of a notched eyebrow at the conviction in her voice.

The hard light screen of quickly scrolling code hovering in front of Sombra's hand finally strobes with the calling card image of her sugar skull, signaling the successful upload of her protocols, and she clears it with a wave of her fingers before unholstering her machine pistol and attaching a sound suppressor to its muzzle.

"Shall we?" she asks.

Moira gestures imperiously down the corridor. "Lead on."

* * *

For a woman of her stature, Moira is surprisingly stealthy. Widowmaker may be Talon's resident symbolic spider, but it's Moira's spindly frame that best reflects the animal's physiology. She's light on her feet, and limber, and her extreme slenderness enables her to slip between and fold into smaller pockets of space than appear possible at first glance. Gabriel had once likened sparring with her to boxing with a wet ribbon in a windstorm, and had often paired her with Genji in agility demonstrations to highlight the differences between organic and artificial musculature for rookie recruits.

Gabriel would be here now, if not for the fact that the Reaper's methods are far too distinct and his allegiance to Talon too well-known for this level of subterfuge. Even Moira is careful not to dessicate the few souls whose deaths can't be avoided, draining them only enough to render them innocuous before finishing the job with a sock knife to either carotid artery, or a few muffled pops of Sombra's pistol.

Subject Sigma's cell is isolated from the main ward, likely on account of the radius of his powers. The original blueprints have it labeled as being for track storage.

" _Hello?_ " Sombra singsongs through the glass. " _Is there anybody **in** there?_"

Moira scoffs, shoulders the shorter woman aside, and stoops to peer through the smudged plexiglass and chickenwire.

Her first thought, of all things, is of a gingerbread cottage -- of walls padded with slabs of marshmallow over a framework of children's bones, and her would-be Hansel sleeping like a slice of candied orange beyond the blue nylon net stretched taut from floor to ceiling about a third of the way into the room.

"Get the door," she says quietly.

"That's all I am to you people, isn't it? A glorified doorman."

" _Sombra._ "

"Okay, okay…"

Sombra's fingers drum the air in front of the keypad, while Moira readies one of the syringes attached to her belt, palming it as the door's thick bolts tumble back into their slots, and the hinges release with a pneumatic hiss.

"Stay here," she orders.

"But--"

"I know what I'm doing," Moira lies. "It would be more dangerous to divide his attention between us, and I stand the better chance of getting free if anything should happen. There's no way of knowing how his abilities might impact the function of your translocator, but my fade isn't subject to the same physics; I don't think it will be affected."

"You don't _think?_ "

Moira sighs. "No, I don't _think,_ but I'm more confident in my doubts than I am in most people's certainties, if that means anything."

"You know, I wish it didn't, because that's one of the most insufferably arrogant things you've ever said -- but yeah, it kinda does. Just…be careful, all right?"

Moira arches a brow at the uncharacteristic display of concern, and the hacker shrugs.

"You still owe me thirteen conchas."

Moira rolls her eyes, then takes a breath, and slips inside, leaving the door slightly ajar behind her.

The noise from the locks doesn't appear to have disturbed him, but she steps gingerly nonetheless, the floor yielding deep and springy beneath her feet, making her joints feel loose and rickety.

He's curled up on his side around a long body pillow, and Moira flashes back to the way he'd slept beneath the bridge of her legs. There's a Dutch idiom, she later learned, that to master something is to have it "under one's knee." She'd liked that; had wanted to tease him with it when they met again, ideally with her legs in some way hooked over his shoulders.

Mastery, though, feels far from her now, as she fades though the net to kneel beside him. It would be immediately safer to sedate him first and ask questions later -- he'd remembered who she was nine years ago, but he may not know her from Adam tonight, and there's no telling what his reaction to her might be in either circumstance -- but while she has no desire to end up an Epelman, it would be equally foolish to invite too many parallels between her own methods and Traugott's. Subject Sigma will see the face of who has him, this time; his humanity will be shown at least that much respect.

Moira passes the syringe to her corrupted right hand, and rests her left against his forehead as if checking him for fever, running her thumb over the deep furrow between his brows, tense even in sleep.

"Siebren," she whispers. "Siebren. Wake up. _Wakker worden, Siebren._ "

His eyelids flutter open, and when he startles, Moira's ready for it, doesn't pull away when he grabs at her wrist and lurches upright.

" _Wat_ \--" he gasps. " _Wat is--?_ "

"Shhh," Moira soothes, splaying her fingers, showing him she means him no harm. "It's all right. You're all right."

Siebren looks at her, blinking, squinting like she's a light source he wasn't prepared to see.

"I'm… What do you want?"

"It's time to go, darling."

"Go? No…" His eyes crease shut in a grimace of pain, and he presses the heel of his free hand against the bridge of his nose. "Please, no tests now. My head…"

A migraine, Moira realizes; well, that much is within her power to remedy.

He doesn't even see the fine golden mist that flows from her hand still shackled about the wrist by his, but its effects are apparent when the tension drains from his face and neck and shoulders a moment later.

Tentatively, he opens his eyes, and breathes a deep sigh of relief when doing so no longer sledges his optic nerves like a white-hot hammer.

"Better?" she asks, and he looks at her again, visibly bewildered by this new development, but not yet alarmed by it.

"Yes, much. Thank you."

A gentle smile curves Moira's lips. "You're very welcome."

Siebren studies her curiously, taking in her mismatched eyes and silver domino, and the barbed, beetle-black armor and pliant plasma veins of her combat suit.

"Are you…" He frowns, watching the luminous substance within the tubes glimmer and swirl like the disembodied arms of a spiral galaxy. "Are you real?"

"Yes," she says. "Yes, Siebren, I'm real. Can you… Do you know who I am?"

He blinks and swallows, and looks down at her hand in his. Slowly, he circles his thumb around the port fixed in the dish of her palm, and after a moment's examination, his fingers loosen, and glide up over the back of her hand.

Moira holds absolutely still, barely breathing as she watches his thumb trace her skin in an arc from the base of her index finger to the tip of her pinky, distantly aware that this is, to the best of her knowledge, the closest he's been to another human being in nearly a decade, and certainly the first time he's been allowed to touch one in just as long.

She's glad it's her. Even as the seconds tick past, and her stomach tightens against the awful, hollow feeling of impending disappointment, she's glad it's her.

A small splash against the inside of her wrist draws her attention back to his face, where a film of tears glosses his gray eyes into mirrors as he stares at her, steadily now -- knowingly.

"Moira?"

She almost doesn't recognize the word, never having heard it said with such a terrible mixture of hope and disbelief. It's as though her own name has just been flung in her face like a glass of wine, and she hasn't even recovered enough to speak before he gasps and pulls away, scrambling back in a frantic crab-walk toward and then halfway _up_ the wall.

"Siebren--" she says, reaching after him.

" _No!_ " he cries, holding up a hand to stop her. "No, you can't -- you can't be here, it's not safe, I-- Things, things _happen_ and I don't know, I don't, but I'm _there_ and they're _me,_ and if I knew the words I'd ask but there are only letters. _You_ know; you can spell. You're a witch."

"A witch?" Moira echoes, blinking back thoughts of ovens and flames.

" _Een heks, ja._ " He tilts his head, his eyes soft and sad and wistful. " _Mijn heksje. Mijn stertje._ The brightest thing I ever…" He shakes himself, and his agitation ratchets up again. "But I-- I-I eat the light and it tastes like you and you _can't_ stay here, Moira, _please--_ "

"All right," she quickly agrees. "All right, Siebren, I won't stay here. I promise."

"Good." He subsides, nodding earnestly even as his his breath stutters and his lips press together against a sob. "Good."

"But neither will you."

She fades, and the needle bites through his jumpsuit and into the meat of his thigh before she's even fully rematerialized before him. 

Siebren's eyes widen in a jumble of shock and confusion, but a half-breathed "How…?" is all he manages to utter before the drugs take hold for what Moira vows will be the last time for a long time to come.

She catches him under his arms as he falls, and staggers with him to the floor, mindful of his head in relation to the defensive spikes jutting from the shoulders of her jacket.

She eases him onto his back, checks his pulse, and then taps the comm button on the side of her headset.

"He's out," she says flatly. "We'll need a stretcher."

"On it," comes Sombra's ready reply. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. Everything's…everything's fine."

The cell feels strangely immense now, a yawning, purgatorial antechamber between a single before and innumerable potential afters.

Her left hand settles again on Siebren's unconscious brow, and she wishes it was that easy -- that she could mend his fractured mind with as little fuss as a headache or a broken bone.

Still, their disjointed conversation holds promise: not only does he remember her, but he knows at least something of what he's about, and there's a level of sophistication in his word associations that goes beyond psychotic clanging -- there's continuity there, structure, and where there's a code, there's a cypher; all she has to do is deconstruct it.

Moira is, by nature, a reverse-engineer: her whole life, she's taken things apart and put them back together, with the end result that they do more than what they formerly did with less than they originally contained. She's done it for Gabriel, she's done it to Lacroix; she can do the same with Siebren, and she will.

She will.

Moira cups his sallow cheek, and thumbs away the tear tracks already drying on his skin.

_My lad insane..._

" _Was zum Teufel-- Bist du bescheuert?_ "

She frowns at the interruption, having very nearly forgotten about the addendum she'd requested be tacked on to the night's activities.

" _Was machen Sie? Geh von ihm weg! Wächter!_ "

Moira turns her face to the sputtering Otto Traugott, a short, bespectacled man with a bristling gray mustache that gives him the look of a befuddled Scottish terrier. His suit, she notes with no small amount of sartorial disdain, is a travesty of wrinkles -- either he's just thrown himself together fresh from sleep, or he's one of those naturally sloppy people who always believes they can do two things at once and never manage half of either. She suspects the latter.

But where are her manners? She is a guest in his house, after a fashion, even if he himself has none to speak of.

"Good evening, Herr Doktor," she says, rising to her full height with hands clasped primly behind her back. "My apologies for failing to inform you of my appointment with Doctor de Kuiper here, but as you were the cause of our last missed connection, I was understandably leery of arranging our meeting through official channels."

"What are you talking about? Who are you?"

Moira smiles. "Don't you recognize me? No, I suppose that was a long time ago, and his description _was_ rather vague. I am the Prettiest Star. Not a title I would have bestowed upon myself, I assure you, but there are worse endearments."

"The Prettiest…" Traugott's gaze flicks between her eyes, and Moira feels a malevolent little thrill as she watches the realization ripple across his face, making his mustache quiver. "Red and blue... You're a woman."

"Your powers of observation astound and amaze. Still, I'm pleased you remember. That's going to make this _so_ much more satisfying."

She takes out her sock knife, and Traugott's flight reflex kicks in with gusto, propelling him toward the door -- only to be clotheslined at the threshold by an invisible fist to the throat that knocks him to the floor and leaves him gagging, glasses askew.

Sombra deactivates her thermoptic camo and grins proudly at Moira, who's calmly but quickly sawing a vertical line through the nylon net.

"Got the stretcher," she says, guiding the hovering litter inside the cell, sidestepping the writhing Traugott with an unimpressed wrinkle of her nose.

"Good," says Moira. "Bring it here and slide it under when I roll him."

" _Nein!_ " Traugott rasps between roughly wheezing coughs. "You don't want to do this! Whatever you think you know of that man, whoever he was to you -- he's not that person anymore! He's dangerous!"

"Aren't we all?" Moira shrugs, crouching over the man in question. She nods at Sombra, who lowers the stretcher to ground-level. "On three. One, two--"

"Please, you can't! If you remove him from this facility, people will die -- _you_ will die! He cannot be controlled, he's a monster--"

The sentence is cut short by a gurgle of blood in his windpipe -- a byproduct of both Moira's sock knife having just been embedded through the side of his neck, and her knee being newly materialized against his diaphragm.

"Do you know, Herr Doktor, the root of that word?" she asks as he chokes on the mix of blood and sputum that flecks his ridiculous mustache like bright red berries on a frosted bush. "You somehow acquired your MD; one assumes you must have at least a passing familiarity with Latin. Monstrum: from _moneō,_ 'to warn,' combined with the instrumental suffix, _-trum._ An instrument that warns, Herr Doktor. An omen. An oracle. Perhaps, if you'd known that, you would have actually listened to what he had to say. But you never hear anything, do you?"

She twists the knife, and he jerks beneath her, one last, spasmodic breath spraying her cheek with gore before his lungs rattle into stillness, and his eyes take on the nothing stare of death.

"You stupid man," Moira whispers.

She sits back and wipes her face with the back of her corrupted hand, then gets to her feet, and turns to find Sombra staring at her, eyebrows lifted. 

"What?" she snaps.

Sombra holds up her hands. "Relax, Hamlet, I was just waiting for you to finish your monologue. Nice one, by the way -- unsettling, yet educational. A solid seven out of ten. Can we go now? I have to pee."

Moira sighs as she comes around to the other side of the stretcher, checking as she does the velcro straps that secure Siebren's limbs and head to the mattress.

"Why didn't you go before we left the base?"

"I did! It's been like four hours; not all of us have the bladder of a camel, jeez."

"Hm. You know, I could probably modify--"

" _No._ "

"…Coward."

* * *

They make their way to the agreed-upon freight elevator, and Sombra relays their position to the drop ship pilot while Moira orders the men at the vent to pull out as soon as they've activated the diversionary measures -- in this case, the lighting of a long fuse studded with flashbang and smoke grenades that had been clipped to Sombra's ankle as she'd followed Moira through the vent pipe. They won't be enough to rouse the locals, or inflict the facility with anything more than cosmetic damage, but they _will_ prompt the rerouting of at least half the above-ground security forces, leaving a skeleton crew to be picked off in pairs by a ghost with a gun and a vampire whose bite is just as effective from a distance as it is at close range.

It's far from a fair fight, not that Moira's ever concerned herself with such a ludicrous concept, and both they and their cargo are seen safely loaded in the drop ship less than two minutes from the opening of the elevator doors.

Moira secures the stretcher to the wall as they ascend, and then heads for the cockpit.

"Change of plans," she says. "New landing coordinates: 53.6158 degrees north, 10.1963 west."

The pilot hesitates. "That's not what Doomfist ordered."

"Doomfist isn't here; I am."

"But--"

"Tell me," Moira asks, smiling feral and leaning close, clasping him pointedly by the shoulder with her left hand as she conjures a violet orb in her right, "whose bad side would you rather be on, truly? His, or mine?"

The pilot gulps thickly, and his hand shakes as he programs the requested destination into their flight path.

"Clever boy." Moira gives him a pat and vanishes the orb, and then makes her way back to her seat, tracked by Sombra's burningly curious gaze.

" _¿Que_ the fuck?" the hacker asks out of the side of her mouth as Moira buckles in beside her.

"Two dozen conchas and a bottle of mezcal," Moira mutters.

"Uh-uh, _no bueno._ I'm gonna need something a little more fortifying than pastries and booze if you want me to make your excuses to the Big D."

"I can make my own excuses. I'm the ranking officer on this mission; all you need say is that you were following orders."

"I mean, I _could_ do that, sure. I could also activate the autopilot on this thing, and you could explain to Akande in person why you're running off to Ireland with Talon's new toy while he's still mint in box."

Moira's jaw clenches at the flippant comparison, but she bites her tongue on the urge to dispute it, knowing Sombra would be quick to call out her hypocrisy, and even quicker to leverage her anger against her and hem her further into a corner of uncomfortable truths that she would very much prefer to avoid at present.

She needs to offer something of equal gravity -- something important enough that Sombra will sooner take the deal than risk its absence from the table by making any further demands.

"Lacroix," she says after a moment.

The hacker bristles immediately. "What the fuck does she have to do with this?"

"Nothing. But I'll owe you a favor. You'll know when to call it in."

She doesn't elaborate, and Sombra, after gauging her sincerity with a long, hard stare, settles back in her seat in silent acceptance of the terms.

Moira exhales a quiet breath and closes her eyes, suddenly exhausted, and the night isn't over yet.

"One thing, though--" Sombra adds.

Moira looks at her blankly.

" _Please_ tell me wherever we're going has a bathroom?"

* * *

  
Moira's maternal great-aunt Bláithín Magorrian had been a cantankerous old harridan of truly legendary proportions. Standing six-and-a-half feet tall, she'd gained a reputation among the locals of Inishroon -- a tiny island off the coast of County Galway, population thirty-one, according to the census of 2072 -- as something of their very own Cailleach Bhéara: winter made flesh in the form of a giant crone, with a tongue sharp as an icicle's point and a face that reflected every crag in the limestone bluffs atop which her house brooded like a mean black hen.

She'd died twenty-three years ago, and in doing so had left the totality of her worldly possessions to, according to her will, _the only member of this godforsaken family with half a brain: my miserable little pox of a great-niece, Moira._

Even now, said miserable little pox warms a bit at the memory, as the cargo door to the drop ship opens just outside the low stone wall ringing the garden of the large thatched-roof cottage and its lone hazel tree, still with a few bright gold serrated leaves clinging to its slender branches.

"Move, move, move, move, move--" Sombra shoulders past her and the others, making for the front door at a quick trot.

"Keys!" Moira calls, tossing them after her, and Sombra doesn't stop moving as she turns to catch them in one hand. "End of the hall, to the right."

"Thank you!"

Moira unstraps the stretcher from the wall of the drop ship, and she and the funny farm redshirt guide it into the house and upstairs to the master bedroom. The operative is respectful, at least, executing her orders without obviously staring at either her home or the man they carefully transfer to the bed, perhaps remembering what it feels like to have one's privacy revoked in the name of necessity.

"What's your name?" she asks him.

"Ricci, ma'am. Angelo."

Moira files it away in her slim mental rolodex of people worth a second glance, and nods. "Thank you, Ricci, that will be all."

He salutes and leaves the room just as Sombra enters, looking substantially more relaxed, holding a picture frame in her hands and wearing a supremely amused grin on her face.

"Is this _you?_ " she demands.

Moira glances at the photo and groans, covering her face with one hand. It is indeed her, aged sixteen, scowling at the camera in all her baby bat glory: hair dyed the darkest purple she could find, black lipstick and pancake white face, with a crescent moon drawn on her forehead and Pierrot tears hooking down from her eyes in black liquid eyeliner, and all of that clad in a spiked choker, ruffled black poet shirt, and a leather moto jacket she'd been enormously proud of at the time, having shredded, studded, patched and safety-pinned it herself.

"I can't be held responsible for that," she says lamely against Sombra's cackle of delight. "It was the '40s."

"The fuck you can't. Holy shit, I can't believe you were a full-on, hellier-than-thou trad goth. --Actually, I can; it explains so much."

Moira sighs as she begins the process of properly powering down and fully unfastening her equipment. "Put it back, Sombra."

"I will," Sombra promises, "soon as I scan it. _Jefe's_ gonna _love_ this. We got two Reapers on our team!"

"Die, die, die," Moira deadpans, resting her rig against the blanket box at the foot of the bed.

"Aw, don't be like that. You were adorable. Like a grumpy little _grisón._ "

"A what?"

" _El grisón._ It's related to, like, badgers and weasels and shit. Family Musty-something."

Moira closes her eyes. "Mustelidae. Please leave. I'd like to shower before I have to talk Akande out of sending Widowmaker after _me,_ although I'm sure she'd love to have the excuse."

"No lie there." Sombra sobers, chewing the inside of one cheek as she studies the man resting peacefully, for the moment, on the bed. "You sure about this?"

 _No, not in the slightest._ "I'm sure. He's…"

Moira doesn't finish the sentence, having no idea what, if anything, she was about to say.

"Go. We'll be fine."

She doesn't let her shoulders fall until she hears the noise of the drop ship's engines recede into the distance, and all that's left is the hushed roar of the waves of the North Atlantic breaking against the rocks some forty meters below.

She should really check the state of the supplies she'd had delivered from Oasis the day before, to make sure everything has arrived whole and fully functional. Probably she should eat something, too, or at least wet the kettle for tea, but she's reluctant to leave Siebren alone, on the off chance he awakens sooner than anticipated. Moira needs to be here for that, needs him to feel from the first as safe as she's able to make him, provided that safety remains an illusion to which he still has access. God knows she's long since lost that consolatory key where she herself is concerned.

She sits on the edge of the bed and takes one of his large, cool hands in hers, and so as not to feel as though she's touching him simply because she can, she checks his pulse again: a strong and steady fifty beats per minute.

At least she can shower without losing sight of him, if she leaves the door to the en-suite bathroom open; still, she doesn't linger under the spray, tempting though it is to curl up on the tiles and let the hot water scald her right to sleep, but she does dress in her coziest things when she's done -- a pair of fleece-lined joggers, wool socks, and one out of a drawer full of oversized Aran sweaters, with the last scented comfortingly of the lavender and cedarwood sachets Aintín Blá had always employed to keep her clothes fresh and the moths at bay.

There's a moment of ambivalence afterward, as Moira contemplates the empty half of the large bed. Were circumstances anything other than what they are, she imagines Siebren would welcome sharing the space with her, but as things stand, it seems presumptuous and not a little foolhardy to assume he'll awake any less fearful of her closeness here than he was at the facility.

She lies down instead on the stretcher still hovering parallel to the mattress, and contents herself with reaching across the chasm between them to curl her fingers around his arm.

Heaven only knows what the morning will bring, but for now, it's enough that he's here, alive, with her -- in his own words, where and to whom he belongs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, at last, the setting-up is done. Now I can write the fun things. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
> 
> Inishroon is my own invention, modeled somewhat after Inishmaan and situated between(-ish) Inishark and Inishbofin. So many inisheseses. But I prefer making things up to getting real things wrong.
> 
> Radiohead supplied the chapter title, and Sombra quotes "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd, because every character in Overwatch is an oldies fan. ;)


	3. Visions of Gideon

_I used to love doing homework. It was a tremendous pleasure, maths exercises in particular. Not so much the exercises themselves, but writing them and then seeing what the page looked like._

\--Pina Bausch

The buzz of her phone, trapped between her thigh and the stretcher's paltry mattress, cuts through Moira's suspended consciousness like a power saw, and her reflexive grimace only deepens when she cracks an eye open and sees the blurry number displayed on the screen. It's unattached to any name in her list of contacts, but she recognizes it all the same, and for a moment she's tempted to ignore it and claim later that she'd simply forgotten to disable Airplane Mode after the mission.

But no: it would be far worse to put it off -- catastrophic, in all likelihood -- and so, following a cursory check to be certain Siebren's still soundly asleep, she slides off the stretcher and ducks into the hall, closing the door behind her with a quiet click.

She clears her throat and hits Answer on the touchscreen, and Akande Ogundimu's thunderous countenance comes into view.

"Good morning, Doctor O'Deorain," he says, any cordiality in the greeting negated by his icy tone. "I hope I didn't wake you."

To deny it would be useless -- her own face in the corner of the screen gives her away, not only puffy from sleep, but with one cheek embossed with a bright pink cable knit pattern from having used her own arm in place of a pillow.

Better to behave as though nothing out of the ordinary has taken place -- as though the very idea that she's overstepped her bounds is tantamount to slander.

"In fact you did," she tells him, yawning behind her hand for good measure. "It was a long night, as you well know."

"Indeed. But what I don't know -- what I am _yearning_ to find out -- is why that long night ended three countries and two bodies of water away from its planned destination."

Moira looks nonplussed. "As I recall, its planned destination was a Talon facility, location unspecified. Being a member of Talon -- of its Inner Circle, no less -- I saw no reason why one of my homes oughtn't qualify as such. I admit, it was a last-minute decision, but--"

"A last-minute decision?" Akande repeats, incredulous. "You made a last-minute decision to take an unstable man with godlike abilities that he cannot yet control to an unconcealed, unsecure location, with no backup, no protection, and no way of containing him should he object to being there?"

"Yes," she says plainly, shrugging one angular shoulder.

Akande's left eye develops a tic that appears dangerously at odds with his congenial smile. "Please, enlighten me as to what led you to make this extraordinary determination. Enlighten me _hastily._ "

Moira sighs and runs a hand back through her hair, bent at all angles from being slept on wet.

"Where was the very first place you chose to go, after Reyes broke you out of prison?" she asks. "Did you toddle off to another one, to see how the accommodations compared? Or did you choose an environment as diametrically opposed to that of incarceration as you could think of?"

"Doctor O'Deorain--"

"Where did you _go,_ Akande?"

"…Zuma Rock."

"That's a Nigerian monolith, yes? Sacred in some way, I presume. You climbed a mountain, a symbol of conquest and spiritual ascension, beneath the open skies of your ancestral homeland. How good that must have felt, how like being reborn after so many years of confinement, and you having spent them with greater access to the world than S-- Subject Sigma was given leave to dream of."

Akande's mouth thins, but he doesn't dispute her summation. 

"Be that as it may," he says, "I fail to see how your house in Ireland would equate to the same experience for-- …Ah." Moira can practically hear the click between his ears as the notches align and the fence falls into the gap, unlocking the insinuation. "Not your house: _you._ The two of you were…acquainted, prior to his accident."

"Briefly, yes." She feels oddly sick admitting it to Doomfist in particular, but the best lies, like pearls, require a grain of truth at their core -- a necessary transparency around which to spin the opaque nacre of deceit.

"But intimately enough, I assume."

Moira allows her arched brow to speak for her, and Akande's eyes narrow.

"And you did not feel this information worth sharing when you were first presented with his file, because…?"

"Because I'm not in the habit of compromising my personal privacy for the sake of something potentially irrelevant. It was one night; I didn't know whether he would even remember me. He does, and so I brought him here."

Akande sneers. "It must have been quite the night, to have stuck with him this long."

Moira ignores the bait and presses on. "Doctor de Kuiper was at a crossroads. I…helped him choose a direction. I can help him to choose one again. You wanted my assessment; this is it: our history together, such as it is, predisposes him to trust me. Would you rather I had squandered that boon by bringing him back to Venice and continuing to treat him as a lab rabbit? Or does it make more sense for me to exploit any persisting affections he may harbor for me to bind him more fully to our cause?"

Akande exhales a long breath through his nose, obviously dissatisfied with her explanation, but unable to refute its logic.

"Honestly," Moira continues, "it's not as if I've bundled him off by magical horse to Tír na nÓg. You know where we are. If you want him back in Venice, then by all means send us another ship -- but if you want him to be remotely useful when he gets there, you'll let me work, _here,_ with no distractions, until I deem him mentally sound enough to be put through the rigors of physical training."

Another unhappy breath, but she can see it in his eyes that she's won -- not the war, certainly, and he'll not be so easy to ambush a second time, but today's battle is hers, and the importance of the time it's bought her cannot be overstated.

"Fine," Doomfist growls. "Keep him there, for the time being. But I will have regular reports. _Daily_ reports."

"Of course. I'm not after a damned holiday, Akande. What this man can do… It took me decades to unlock even a fraction of the possibilities lurking within the human genetic code, and he comes by even greater ones through mere happenstance? You don't really believe I'd to let something like that slide without some sort of reckoning, do you?"

"Perhaps not. But I'll be putting a retrieval team on indefinite standby until you return, in the event he finds life under your thumb a little too…stifling."

Moira rolls her eyes, as if this is all very silly and a great inconvenience.

"If you must," she says, and her phone returns to its home screen as Akande hangs up without further comment or instruction.

She slips it back into the pocket of her joggers, gives herself precisely two seconds to sag against the wall in relief, and re-enters the bedroom not a moment too soon -- Siebren's stirring, shifting fitfully towards consciousness atop the olive linen duvet. Moira's there in three long strides, sits beside him and takes one of his hands in both of hers as his eyes blink slowly open.

"Siebren," she says softly, when he comes abruptly awake as he did before. "Shhh, shh, it's okay, you're safe. You're safe."

Siebren's breathing hastens as he rapidly scans the room, taking in the unfamiliar sight of furniture and windows, whitewashed walls and dark, exposed ceiling beams.

"What's-- What's happening?" he demands. "Where is this what's happening?"

"I brought you here," she explains in a soothing monotone. "You're in my home."

His eyes find her at last, darting over her face, her hands, her face again.

"Moira," he breathes. "Moira, you -- you built a bridge! You built--"

She feels it, this time -- a subtle thinning of the air, a cloudy sensation in her ears like that of being in a plane during takeoff.

"Siebren," she says firmly, tightening her grip on his hand, "I need you to stay calm for me, all right? Deep, slow breaths."

" _Maar jij--_ I wanted-- Moira, _no,_ " he whines, but just as she expects him to struggle away, he pulls her closer, wrapping his arms around her and hiding his face against the side of her neck. "No no no…"

He's holding her so tightly it's difficult to get a full breath, but Moira squeezes him back just as hard. She cradles the back of his head with her right hand and balls the fingers of her left into a fist, and rubs her knuckles between his scapulae at the same measured pace she wishes him to breathe.

"It's all right," she murmurs. "Everything's all right. Deep and slow, now...deep and slow... Good. I know you're afraid, darling, but I'm not. Okay? Just relax..."

Her ears pop and equalize as her weight presses as it should into the mattress, and Siebren whispers something into the thick wool of her sweater.

"What's that?" she asks.

He doesn't lift his head or raise his voice, and she tilts her head to hear him better.

"…don't understand," he says. "I don't understand."

Moira closes her eyes and presses her cheek against the top of his head.

"Nor do I. But we'll figure it out."

* * *

He smells like a hospital, like sweat and disinfectant and over-processed food, and she decides that the skin of the facility is the first thing that needs to be shed.

She coaxes him into the bathroom and sits him down on the toilet lid while she turns on the water in the large glass shower stall and regulates the temperature. Part of why she chose this house for the earliest stages of his rehabilitation, apart from its isolation and homey atmosphere, was for its creature-comforts: few places were built to scale with anyone over six feet tall in mind, but Aintín Blá's formidable height had led her to remodel or replace all of its surfaces and amenities to accommodate her own lanky stature. It's a luxury too seldom considered, being able to cook without hunching and shower without stooping, and to lie flat on a bed without one's feet dangling off the bottom of the mattress.

With the water now neither too hot nor too cold, she stands him up, and undoes the zip at the back of his searingly orange jumpsuit. It's made of stiff waxed canvas with rough, thick seams, and she winces at how uncomfortable he must have found it in the beginning, how like sandpaper against his hypersensitive nerves. She's glad she's ordered him only loose, soft, tagless things for the time being, cashmere and micro-modal and brushed cotton flannel in gentle blues and ashy grays, easy on both the eyes and skin.

It feels surreal to undress him thus -- slowly, but not seductively. He's still broad -- no amount of weight loss could undo that basic framework shaped by decades of athleticism -- but the ratio of muscle to bone is substantially lower, with his joints filed sharp and his brute strength whittled down to wiry sinew. It's nothing that an increase in protein intake and physical activity can't correct; combined with biotic therapy, she doubts it will take him more than a couple of months to regain his former physique, once he's settled.

He studies her as well, when she removes her own things, but his interest feels more curious than carnal -- perhaps cataloguing what parts of her body differ now from those he remembers, if any. Even when she guides him into the shower and under the spray, and begins soaping him down with gentle efficiency, he reaches for her only to maintain his balance as she adjusts him this way and that, lifting his legs one at a time so that she can wash the soles of his feet.

It's not until she's rinsed him off and wet down her own hair so that it will dry with hopefully less of a resemblance to a rooster's comb that Siebren himself takes some form of initiative, lifting his hands to frame her face just as he had so long ago, after she'd…

Moira goes still and looks up at him, thinking for one apprehensive moment that he means to kiss her, but all he does is look, and then slide his hands down her shoulders and arms.

He takes her right hand in both of his, and frowns at the hypoxic, uncanny-looking skin, at her claw-like nails and the darkly marbled mix of veins and cybernetic enhancements that climb her forearm and fade just above her elbow.

"How did this happen?" he asks, his voice barely audible over the noise of the water.

Moira licks her lips, and forces herself not to withdraw her hand. She's never been ashamed of the things she's done to herself, never once regretted being her own guinea pig when oversight denied her any other human recourse -- she was right; she'd known she was right, and the visible alterations to her person only serve to remind both herself and her detractors of her intellectual triumphs -- but the sorrowful expression on his face makes her pride flinch back, makes her want to turn and hide and wish the aesthetic cost had been less horrific to behold.

"I did it," she says frankly, because she doesn't shrink from the truth when there is no larger revelation a lie could serve to later expose, although she can't admit it without averting her gaze.

"Why?"

She shrugs. "Because it had to be done."

That, at least, he understands, even now -- the inability to leave enigmatic that which science suggests could be unveiled. His transformation may not be as immediately apparent as hers, but it's a product of the same inherent personality flaw that deems willful ignorance the only absolutely unpardonable sin.

Even so, she can feel his sorrow in the silence between them, a useless, rueful ache, and she shakes her head and turns to twist off the taps before he can do anything insensibly tender to knock her even further off-kilter.

"Moira," he says, tightening his fingers around hers.

_Damn it--_

"Are you hungry?" she asks, much too brightly, and when she moves to lead him out of the shower, he doesn't follow, his arm stretching taut against her gentle pull while his feet remain firmly planted on the tiles. "Siebren…?"

His eyes stare at a random point on the glass partition, where rivulets of water continue to combine and branch and fall, but Moira doesn't get the sense that he's focused on anything but her.

"Come," she tries again. "You'll catch cold."

She can tell by the gooseflesh plucking up on the skin of his arms and chest that he's a little cold already, and with a sigh she fetches two bath sheets from the linen press and rejoins him in the shower to drape one of them around his shoulders like a mantle.

"Is something the matter?" she asks.

Siebren turns his face to the side, looking down now into a corner.

"You said you weren't afraid," he quietly accuses, but he sounds more uncertain than petulant.

"I'm--" Moira starts, but she's at a loss for how to explain herself. "I just...don't want to make things worse."

He says nothing to that, and she can't tell whether he understands what she means by it -- if she even understands it herself -- but he comes with her, this time, when she steps back onto the bathmat. She dries them both quickly and puts her things back on, and once she's retrieved the clothes she purchased for him, he assists her in dressing himself, pulling on the pale gray pullover while she takes care of his loungers and socks. 

She sees his teeth brushed, then her own, and then guides him downstairs to the kitchen while he takes in his new surroundings in snippets, eyes darting back and forth as if following a tennis match at speed. She sits him down on one of the bar stools bordering the central island, but when she moves to fill the kettle, she feels a tug on her sweater, and finds him clutching at the hem.

"I'm not going anywhere," she assures him, gently uncurling his fingers and placing his hand in his lap. "Just making coffee. Would you like some?"

Again, he doesn't respond, and she wonders if perhaps he can't right now, too overwhelmed by the changes of the past few hours to give voice to his thoughts.

"How about some eggs, hm?" She smooths a hand over his head, feeling the slight, bristly shadow of his hair just beginning to grow out, probably spurred on by last night's treatment of his migraine.

Siebren, for his part, closes his eyes leans into the caress like a cat, which Moira chooses to take as a yes.

She makes coffee and eggs overeasy, with buttered toast for dipping, and sets out cream and sugar and elderberry jam, none of which he ends up using. His hands tremble around his mug, but not so badly that he can't drink without spilling, and he manages his fork well enough, using it to scoop slices of egg onto the broader, more easily maneuvered triangles of toast. Hopefully the tremors will improve as she steps down his medications, the goal there being to get him to a place where at most he requires only an occasional benzodiazepine for anxiety, but Moira's nonetheless glad to see evidence of his continuing ability to think in the abstract.

With her own plate in hand, she comes to perch on the stool next to his, and flashes back to the moment she first saw him, and felt that inexplicable tug just below her navel, reeling her in like a fish to the empty seat one away from his at the hotel bar. It had seemed like simple attraction, then -- animal magnetism, or whatever cliché phrase people apply to such things -- but she feels it now, too, just as keenly as she did then, despite sex being the furthest thing from her mind at present, and it occurs to her that the morning so far has played out something like their night together in reverse, beginning in bed, ending up here.

It hurts, somehow. She hasn't seen him in a decade, and yet now that he's beside her, she feels the loss of all they might have shared and been more sharply than she has in years.

Perhaps it's that she has nothing with which to distract herself beyond a meager breakfast she lacks appetite enough to finish (although she's pleased to note that Siebren has eaten all of his, and polished off his coffee, too); there's always been a mission, a project, a puzzle to be solved.

He's the puzzle now, and even with all her reckless self-experimentation, she's never had one to which -- to _whom_ \-- she's felt so…entangled, in both the process and the outcome, and the urge to worry at the knot is a nettlesome itch in the back of her brain.

"We'll not do anything today," she tells him, "but soon I'd like to run some tests, if that's agreeable to you -- nothing too invasive, just blood panels and the like for now, and maybe--"

The condiments and their plates and mugs skid toward him over the countertop and cartwheel up into the air, slowly scattering crumbs and granules and distorted orbs of cream and coffee in every direction. 

_Shit._

"Sorry!" he yelps, scrambling panicked off of his stool, only for it and himself to begin floating, too. "I'm sorry I can't help it I'm, I don't--"

"No, Siebren--!" Moira gasps as her toes only scrape the floor when she moves to go to him, but she ignores the surge of instinct to escape, to fade out of range of this riptide in reverse, and pushes off of the island to drift quickly to his side, pulling him close and embracing him tightly. "Shhh, it's okay, it's my fault, I didn't think-- Siebren, come here to me: no tests, love. Not until you're ready. Okay? Nothing until you're ready. Shh, it's all right…"

He whimpers, curling up and clinging to her like a life buoy in a storm-tossed sea, hiding his face in her sweater as their shoulders bump against the wall. Moira grabs hold of the door jamb and pushes them down to the floor, and holds them there until at last she feels the pull of gravity return their full weight to the ground amidst the clatter and crash of their breakfast things hitting the tiles. Siebren flinches at the noise, apologizing again as he burrows further into her.

"It's all right," she murmurs, rocking him now that there's resistance enough to do so. "No use crying over flying milk, hey?"

He doesn't laugh, but she didn't expect that he would.

God, what the fuck is she doing? He's barely been awake for two hours and she's already making a hames of things--

No. No, frustration will get them nowhere. The best thing, she decides, the best thing is simply to adapt as they go along: a routine of meals and sleep, but beyond that, it's more important right now that he feels he has some sort of agency over what happens to him. The rest can wait, at least for a little while. Akande can wait. _She_ can wait.

At least she's twice been able to calm him without resorting to sedatives. It's remarkable what simple human comfort can accomplish, not that Moira imagines he'd have responded as favorably to a hug from the late Dr. Traugott; in any case, it's heartening to know she can provide at least this small portion of what he needs -- it may even prove to be a jumping-off point to his first steps toward real control, if he comes to view her as a safety net he can fall back on, and from there to trust her when she tells him he can trust himself.

"I feel sick," he whispers, and Moira frowns.

"Do you usually, after…afterward?" She takes one of his hands and pinches at the acupressure point in the fleshy web between his thumb and forefinger, and counts to thirty in the back of her mind -- one of Genji's tricks, when his cybernetics would play havoc with his sense of spatial awareness.

Siebren nods against her chest. "Things…swarm. The sounds and the ripples and the worms on the walls. Like snow made of light. I caught one on my tongue like a pumpkin bean."

"Pumpkins have seeds, love, not beans."

"A ladder is a very long wheel," he sighs.

Moira blinks. "Well, you've got me there." She releases his hand to cup his jaw, and tilts his face up to hers. "Do you think you feel well enough to chance the stairs? You can have another rest while I get everything cleared up here."

He starts to look distressed again, shaking his head and pawing at her sweater.

"I don't…I don't want--"

"I'll be with you," she promises. "I'll stay until you fall asleep, and I'll be right there when you wake up again. Does that sound all right?"

He swallows nervously, but after a moment's hesitation, he nods.

Moira helps him to his feet, steadying him when his blood pressure takes a few moments to correct for the sudden change in position. She takes him back up to the bedroom, and sees that he's properly tucked in this time before she lies down beside him over the bedclothes.

It doesn't take long -- so little and yet so much has happened in the span of half a morning, and he's visibly fighting to keep his eyes open not a minute after his head touches the pillow.

Moira's true to her word, waiting until his fingers slacken and his breathing quiets and slows before gently extricating her hand from his and backing carefully off the bed.

Downstairs, she rights the upset bar stools, sweeps up the sugar and crumbs and shards of stoneware, and steams the dried egg yolk, jam and coffee stains from the kitchen floor. She supposes she should count her blessings that she isn't having to clean the ceiling, too, but with lunch and dinner still to come, it feels rather like naming her chickens before they've hatched.

Oh, well. She's dealt with far greater and more hazardous messes, and at least this one doesn't mandate a frigid decontamination shower and twenty-six-day quarantine after. That particular little mishap had caused her cabin fever enough, and that with her reader and its cloud of work and entertainment options, and the occasional visit from her department fellows; she can't imagine nine and a half years of being cooped up without so much as a tablet for a window to the outside world, and only one's own thoughts and the disembodied voice of an intellectually impotent gombeen for conversation.

It's no wonder he's so fearful of losing sight of her, of not in some way touching her to confirm her presence, her reality, at all times. It's like he's on a space walk without a tether: if he lets go and drifts too far out of reach…

Moira shivers at the thought as she finally makes her way to the modern addition at the back of the house. Unlike the front door, the lab opens by passcode, both inside and through the back garden, both PINs of which she'd remotely changed as soon as she'd received confirmation that her things had been successfully delivered by omnic postal drone. Mostly it's portable imaging equipment, designed for field hospitals in conflict zones and remote scientific outposts. They're prone to slightly higher margins of error than their stationary counterparts, but they're significantly smaller, and reliant on sensors in lieu of encasement, which, with Siebren's current psychological condition, could be disastrous if he were to have an episode mid-scan.

A few items are personal -- her luggage she'd had surreptitiously sent over before leaving Venice, for one, and some others collected by her assistant from her ministerial residence in Oasis: a stack of books, both fiction and non; her journal and preferred fountain pen; some tea and spices she tends to miss whenever she's away; and the most emotionally charged of the lot, a ten-year-old bottle of cologne.

It's this that she now uncaps and brings to her nose, closing her eyes and inhaling the familiar marine and ozone accords, as wetly, sharply green as a watermelon rind, softened by an underscore of sea salt and ambroxide's subtle musk.

Smell is more frequently the favored bedfellow of memory than any other sense, and Moira is selfish with this one. She wears it only a handful of times per year, and never in the company of others, the fragrance having been relegated from signature to secret following the news of Siebren's demise. Such is her association of it with him that, believing she'd never see him again, she could never bring herself to risk its becoming even tangentially connected to any other lovers, any other experiences; she's hesitant to wear it even now, wondering if their reunion under such drastically altered circumstances doesn't warrant its burial over its resurrection -- but it's that thought, that he was essentially buried alive for a sixth of his life, that overrides her misgivings and prompts her finger to depress the bottle's atomizer, enveloping her throat and chest in the finely redolent mist that mixes past and future, precedent and procession.

She will not allow him, any part of him, to be locked away again, no matter the reason, no matter the cost.

That small ritual completed, Moira collects Subject Sigma's file, her journal and pen, a book on mutation research, a mid-level astronomy reference text, and her copy of _Finnegans Wake,_ and makes herself a cup of tea before heading back up to her bedroom.

Siebren hasn't moved since she left him, and she's glad to see by the fluttering of his eyelids that he's deep in the restful REM phase of sleep. Piling the pillows on the empty side of the bed against the headboard, she situates herself cross-legged on the mattress, pulls the top sheet and duvet up to her waist, and settles in to read.

* * *

It's nothing in particular that wakes her -- neither a movement nor a sound -- but an enveloping sense of _difference,_ like walking into a room where all the furniture's been moved six inches to the left: a certainty that something is out of place, impossible to pinpoint because _everything_ is.

Of course, that's only the feeling -- what has actually moved is difficult to miss, it being three inches shy of seven feet long and floating with his face an arm's length above her own.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" she exclaims, rolling sideways off the bed, scarcely managing to catch herself on her hands and knees. "Siebren!"

"Sorry!" he says quickly, buoying up to the ceiling like a loose balloon. "I didn't mean-- I thought-- Time had stopped and the book was dreaming and you're never so still, I just wanted to…to look, I wanted…"

Moira sighs, running a hand over her face as the fizz of adrenaline in her blood flattens back to normal levels.

"It's fine," she says. "You put my heart crossways for a second, is all." She looks up, and notices that he's clutching her journal in both hands, which would alarm her if she thought there was even a possibility that he would be able to read it; fortunately, her secrets are safe from all but the .0015 percent of the global population capable of understanding the language she keeps them in, of which she's 99.99 percent sure Siebren isn't one. "Are you able to come down from there?"

He looks uncertain, and so Moira stands and extends a hand to him, smiling encouragingly.

"I'm not angry, love. You've done nothing wrong. Please come down?"

Slowly, he accepts her hand, and allows her to pull him down to her, righting himself until his toes hover a couple of inches above the rug.

"You can control this?" she asks. "The levitating?"

"A little," he admits. "It feels…feels better. Feels right."

"That's wonderful," Moira says sincerely, and then nods to the little hardcover bound in red cotton twill in his other hand. "You have my journal, I see."

He looks down, as if surprised by this information.

"No. Yes." He shakes his head, reddening, flustered. "Yes but I, I didn't read-- I don't speak Martian."

"Martian?" Moira laughs. "Well, you're hardly the first to have drawn the comparison, I'm sure. It's Gaeilge, love. Irish."

"Your language. Where you're from."

"Yes. That's where we are now, Ireland, on an island west of Connemara, called Inishroon -- Mystery, or Secret Island, in English."

Siebren looks over to the window, curtained by sheer panels of ivy-patterned lace. There's not much to be seen from this vantage point -- the long, dry grass at edge of the cliff, the slate of the sky -- but he studies it nonetheless, head tilted.

"Yes," he says quietly, nodding. "Yes, that's... You ate the apple that fell on my head. I told you. If you read it you'll find out there's nothing wrong with me."

"Read what? My journal?"

Siebren shakes his head. "All of them. And -- and the scales," he whispers, his eyes sliding sideways as if they're even now slithering across the surface of his gaze. "Such sinister scales..."

His fingers drum spasmodically against the book, and Moira frowns, reaching up to stroke his cheek and draw his attention back to her. 

He inhales a shaky breath, then blinks, and inhales again, more deeply, through his nose. 

He looks like he wants to say something, but can't quite work out what it is that's caught his attention, and Moira takes her hand back, her face heating as the mood between them twists abruptly into something evocative of the one they'd shared before.

"You…you smell like…" His brow furrows as he hovers closer and breathes her in again, struggling to flush the appropriate words from the convoluted thicket of his memories. "Like...you're mine?"

She can feel her blush reach all the way up to the tips of her ears. "Like your-- Like the cologne you used to wear, yes. I, ehm, I thought the familiarity might…help."

"Does it?"

He looms closer still, and Moira digs her toes into the rug as the tide of her blood rises beneath her skin, even as she feels that low, unmistakable drop in her stomach. What's happened to him is immaterial in that respect: he's always been the very definition of gravity, as far as she's concerned.

"That's not... P-perhaps it would have been wiser to simply give you the bottle." Jesus wept, she's _stuttering._

"Moira…"

She hasn't the courage to touch him -- doesn't know what either of them might do if she touches him now, even to push him away -- and so she ducks her head instead.

"Siebren, we-- Let's, let's not, just yet, shall we? It's... It wouldn't be…"

Right. Ethical. Everything she doesn't give two fucks about under so many other conditions but it's him, it's _him_ and he still has that damnable knack for worming his way between the cracks of all her own rules and flowering there, like a thistle in pavement, his roots protected by the very thing that should have prevented them from growing in the first place.

"Decent," he finishes for her, and the word hits her strangely, like a kick to the back of the knee.

"Siebren--"

"I _understand,_ Moira." 

His voice is hard, shocking in both its coldness and its level of rationality. It sends a chill dripping down the rungs of her spine -- but just as quickly, he's distracted again, setting her journal aside on the bed in favor of inspecting the braided knotwork designs carved into the wardrobe near the window.

"Even the wood has a weave," he mutters, running his fingers down the varnished oak.

Feeling an odd combination of rejected, relieved, and more than a little rattled, Moira returns to her spot on the bed, ostensibly to pick up where she'd dozed off in her reading, although trying to concentrate on any of it now would be about as useful as a confetti cannon at a funeral. She can't imagine that Siebren would ever intentionally harm her, but she chastens herself for not being more alert to the emotional changeability he'd exhibited in his sessions with Traugott. It would be foolish in the extreme for to take for granted that his regressive innocence isn't merely the top layer of his various traumas' expression. The cologne was a mistake, a regrettably sentimental impulse too tied to a moment more intimate than mere physical nudity. She can't send him mixed signals like that, or herself; it's too unnerving.

Too _tempting._

Thank God Akande is a businessman from a privileged background, for whom networking and nepotism would have been a foundational given whilst growing up; a fellow scientist, or especially another doctor, would have immediately pointed out the hundred and one ways in which Moira's personal relationship to her patient could backfire spectacularly, to the detriment of all parties involved. 

Or perhaps Akande has indeed thought of such things, but is choosing to rely more on her awareness of how he deals with those whose plans backfire. He knows Moira is smart; it could be that he's testing to see whether she believes herself smarter than he -- which, as a matter of fact, she does, but that's a bridge to be bombed on another day.

A bridge…

She opens her journal and adds a phrase to the list of all the things she remembers Siebren having said thus far: _You built a bridge,_ scribed just underneath _The sounds and the ripples and the--_

Moira stops, sits up straighter, and reaches for the astronomy reference already dogeared at its section on black holes.

A few pages further in, and she finds it: an Einstein-Rosen bridge, more commonly referred to as a wormhole -- a shortcut through the throat stretching between two open mouths of spacetime.

Is that how he interprets her fade? Or is it not an interpretation at all, but something he can actually perceive?

_The sounds and the ripples and the worms on the walls._

She looks over to where Siebren is examining the knickknacks on the dresser -- Aintín Blá's ceramic saints, a framed cross-stitch quoting the revolutionary Michael Collins, and a plush lamb with its curly faux wool worn to nubs, among others -- humming to himself as he does, a repetitive four-note rise and fall that reminds her almost synesthetically of a feather waltzing through the air, a mental picture so clear that she feels certain she must have seen and heard it before -- perhaps in a film? But she's at a loss to recall which one.

_What is that melody?_

Moira trades the reference for Siebren's file, and takes from it the printed photograph of the stuffed animal sheet music, her gaze drawn to the rainbow snake that marks the center note.

_Such sinister scales…_

She follows the notes with her finger as he hums: four up, one down. It's the same -- or would be, if he'd had enough animals to complete the sequence -- Moira's sure of it.

He falls silent, and Moira looks over at him again. He's staring down at the plush lamb he now holds carefully in both hands, his head cocked curiously to one side.

"That's Dolly," she says. "My great-aunt, whose house this was, gave her to me on my fourth birthday."

He says nothing for several seconds -- long enough that Moira figures his mind is either elsewhere or that he's fallen back into being nonverbal -- until he quietly asks, "When is your birthday?" 

She sighs; she doesn't like to say, mainly because she's never been able to without the inquirer making some asinine comment about the date, but she highly doubts Siebren has any current interest in being clever about it, and so she tries not to sound too preemptively exasperated when she tells him, "The fourteenth of February."

He grunts in acknowledgment. "You're a water-bearer."

Moira smiles. Of course someone who's dedicated his life to the stars thinks of zodiac constellations before he does a holiday devoted to performative romance.

"I am the fish," he says, frowning. "My tails are chained. I swim in two different directions, and go nowhere; I swim in circles and go nowhere."

"That's easily solved. I'll put you in my cup, you can tell me where you need to go, and I'll take you there."

"And then pour me out? That was a song, wasn't it -- _Goodbye Pisces?_ "

His eyes drift to the window again, his expression growing distant and strange -- reluctant, almost hurt.

Moira looks between Siebren and the photograph and bites her lip, debating, then shuffles the paper to the back, closes the file, and comes to stand in front of him.

Siebren blinks rapidly, his focus rearranging like the gears of a manual transmission, a conscious duet of clutch and shift.

"I won't pour you out," she tells him. "Not if you don't wish me to."

He inhales, twice, as if to speak, but it's as though his mouth can't work fast enough to interrupt his thoughts.

"What if...I were marked poison?" he manages at last. "Would you still move to drink me then?"

She can't quite dodge the unhelpfully literal thought that she already has, and when she covers his hands with her own, she has to batten down the wayward urge to step forward and thread her arms around his waist.

Well, at least the nuns who administered the first half of her formal education would, for once, approve of her actions.

"It's not uncommon for the antidote to be hidden within the venom itself," she points out. "Yes, Siebren, I would drink you even then."

He looks down at the lamb cradled in both their hands. "Like the monsters at the middle. As above, so below: the starry one and the headless king, and all the goblins in between are only bread and bones."

Moira's not sure which is more disconcerting -- the macabre nature of what he says, or the feeling that, on some deeply intuitive level, she knows exactly what he means by it.

One riddle at a time, though. They need to surface for a bit, she thinks -- something mundane yet stimulating enough to draw him out of his thoughts without overloading his senses.

"Speaking of bread," she segues, forcibly brightening her voice, "I promised a colleague I'd bake her something; I thought I might do that now. Come down and keep me company? And Dolly, if you'd like."

"Who? --Oh. Oh, no, I..." He blushes faintly as he returns the plush to its place on the dresser. "She can stay."

"Just us two, then." Moira smiles and takes his arm, and he lowers his feet to the floor so that he can walk alongside her. "Have you ever eaten a concha?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Birthday, Moira. ;) Yes, there exist baby photos of her in a Cupid costume; yes, she will shoot you in the face with a bow and arrow if you happen upon them; yes, Sombra, this means you.
> 
> Chapter title supplied by Sufjan Stevens, and "Goodbye Pisces" is by Tori Amos.
> 
> I'm still so psyched by the response to this, considering how miniscule the pairing is on the Overwatch ship scale. You're all fantastic, thank you so much for the love, and Happy Valentine's Day. 💘


	4. Song to the Siren

_The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be._

\--Douglas Adams

* * *

The raw vulnerability of his first day gradually lessens over the course of the following week, as he grows more accustomed to his new surroundings. He begins of his own accord to bathe and dress himself (although she's always close and hand), and to make use of the electric razor she procured for him. Moira even takes him properly outside for the first time in years, a pair of her sunglasses amusingly small on his face as, arm-in-arm, they explore the salt-seared shrubbery and pebbled paths of the front and back gardens, with Siebren frequently crouching to bunch the grass and peaty soil between his fingers, or comb through fragrant tangles of overgrown lavender and valerian.

He's enchanted, too, by the view to be had from the edge of the bluff, where the crags of the coastline cup the open expanse of sky and sea. Moira brings a thick blanket with them every time after the first, and they sit together, bundled beneath it, until the wind turns the tips of their ears and noses rosy with cold.

It's not all progress, of course -- there's little that doesn't startle him, and much that's subjected to gravitational rearrangement as a result, which honestly concerns her less than his frantic apologies whenever it happens. She crates the few keepsakes it would truly pain her to lose and stores them in the lab, where he's yet to venture, but everything else, she assures him, is either replaceable, repairable, or overdue for the bin besides, and he needn't fear upsetting her for what he cannot help.

Other times, he's rendered almost catatonic, when his perceptions are bottlenecked by his oscillating ability to process the sensory smorgasbord of a fully furnished house and its environs. Migraines, too, are a recurrent source of stress and discomfort, exacerbated by the fact that, in the absence of a gravitic episode, he often doesn't disclose their existence to her until he's quite literally sick with pain. Moira doesn't know if he's actively trying to hide the extent of his debility from her out of some foolish notion that she might consider him a burden, or if treatment of his pain at the facility was neglected to the point that he's come to view his suffering as a forgone conclusion, or if it's simply a side-effect of a lifelong habit of seeking to mask his neurological differences from other people. In any case, she checks in with him about it much more frequently now, and has learned to recognize certain tells -- a stiffness in the way he holds his head, the weakness of his grip on a cup -- that lead her to lower the thermostat and draw the curtains.

He shies from needles, but is all right with pills, and although he never asks, she's careful to explain what she's giving him, and the dose, and why. His tolerance for painkillers is predictably high, and more often than not, she ends up resorting to use of her reactor, which is fine in the short-term, but just as chemotherapy at the turn of the century decimated as many healthy cells as it did malignant ones, overutilization of powerful broad-spectrum nanobiotics runs the risk of triggering a hypertrophic response in insufficiently damaged tissue. Whatever's going on that beautifully bizarre brain of his, she's doesn't want to inadvertantly strengthen the wrong neural pathways.

Siebren, on the other hand, has at present a great deal more interest in the look of the device than what it technically does, watching it with the same fascination the hippies of a hundred years ago bestowed upon the psychedelic miracle of the lava lamp.

"It must have taken a long time to catch them all," he remarks, floating fetal just above the floor, his arms wrapped around his legs and chin resting on his knees as he watches the dimly luminous substance in the tank gently drift and swirl. 

"Catch what, love?" Moira asks from the squashy armchair in the corner, lowering her phone and its message from Sombra -- a photo of the sugar-crusted conchas in their delivery box, surrounded by animated hearts, praying hands, and happy drooling emojis -- to look at him.

"The fireflies!" he exclaims. "There must be thousands in there."

Moira smiles, sets her phone aside and moves to join him, crouching beside him on the floor.

"Millions, in fact," she says, "and they're not fireflies -- they're nanites, suspended in a plasma solution. Here, watch--"

She reverses the reactor's polarity, and the semi-organic solution within brightens and eddies, transmuting into its deadly violet form.

Siebren gasps, darting back through the air like a shrimp through water. "You put beetles in the baptismal font!"

Moira blinks as the trap door of a half-forgotten memory opens beneath her feet: she'd been seven years old, a budding entomologist with a pocketful of specimens in her itchy Sunday dress, at the christening of her baby cousin Ronan. It was summer, the church's aircon was on the fritz, and it was stiflingly, oppressively hot. She'd worried that her little passengers might be thirsty -- God knew she was -- and so she'd plucked them free one by one and set them on the lip of the font, so they could get a drink. When her mother finally noticed what she was doing, she'd screamed and yanked her daughter away from the altar so fast, she'd nearly dislocated Moira's shoulder.

"How did you know that?" she asks.

Siebren tilts his head, and his body follows, listing to starboard in the air. "Know what?"

"That I..." But that's not what he's talking about. Of course it isn't. It can't be. Moira shakes her head, and stands. "Nothing. Nevermind."

Siebren rights himself and returns his attention to the tank, floating closer to press his fingers to the polycarbonate glass -- and then something interesting happens: the nanites in the plasma are repelled by his fingertips in a kind of anti-coronal discharge, a ring of clarity where they ought to gather, ravenous, like microscopic zombies at the doors of a busy shopping mall. 

He nods and mutters to himself, "Yes -- lambs and tigers, heads and heels... --The water's full of holes." This last is directed at Moira, and he glances at her briefly over his shoulder. "Imitative counterpoint. I watched you bless the night long before you anointed me."

"Anointed?"

He turns and stretches his legs to land silently on the area rug in front of her.

"Here," he says, resting a hand on her head and gently grazing her brow with his thumb.

"When I relieve your migraines."

" _Ja._ You...make things better, for me. Then and now."

Moira's heart squeezes in her chest, and she looks away.

"About that…" she says, and clears her throat against an errant catch in her voice. "You need to know, Siebren, that I will not always be able to help you as I am doing now. At some point, we will be required to leave this place, and… Things have changed, since we first met."

"Changed," he repeats, his tone poised somewhere between agreement and apprehension.

"Yes. There are other factors now. It's complicated. I can't explain it all just yet, but it has to do with how I found you, and I want you to know: if I thought there was any other way that I could keep you…" 

Keep him what?

Protected? No.

Safe? Even less.

Simply…keep him. Full stop.

"I'm... I'm doing my best, is all. For both of us. If you could try to remember that…" She lets the sentence hang unfinished in the air, and waits a compositional beat before looking to see whether or not he's understood.

Siebren is silent for a minute, his eyes tracking back and forth as he processes the information, and Moira waits for the riddle of his response -- but when he speaks next, it couldn't be plainer or more lucid:

"It's…been a long time, hasn't it?"

"Ten years next April," she confirms. "The story issued by the ESA was that you succumbed to your injuries two weeks after the incident aboard the space station. The world believes you dead, Siebren. As did I, until a little over a week ago."

She watches his reaction closely, keeping half an eye on the rest of the room, in case anything that shouldn't do begins to move.

"…Oh," is all he says, a chopfallen, hollow sound, and Moira lays a careful hand on his shoulder. She's never been good at condolences, usually lacking the requisite sympathy, but in this instance, her desire to spare him pain is enough to guide her.

"I am sorry," she says.

"It's…" Siebren shakes his head. "Of course, yes, that's-- Ah, and I suppose… --Nora?"

Moira had had a sour feeling in her stomach as she'd looked the woman up, but she'd done it in case he asked.

"Eleanora de Kuiper is Eleanora Schuster now. She married a management consultant from Dresden eight years ago. She lives there now, with him. I am…not sorry about that, but if you are--"

"No," he says, quickly but resolutely. "No, I only… It's… _wat is het woord?_ \--Comic? Not-- Not her, but… You thought I was dead, but so often…so often the thought of you was the only thing that kept me from wanting to die."

Ironic, Moira thinks, is the word that he wants, but it lodges obliquely in her throat.

"I would imagine things," he continues. "Seeing you again. Being with you again. The idea that you were out there, in the world, or above it… And then you -- you were _there,_ and now we are here, and it's… The symmetry is, ah…fearful."

He smiles weakly, and Moira bites her lip, wishing she could say the same -- that she was the type of person quixotic enough to have ever entertained the idea that his ghost might have been watching over her, rejoicing at her victories, sending her strength in the midst of her defeats -- but all she'd felt at the thought of him had been a gnawing, incurable emptiness. Gone was gone, dead was dead, and while his absence from the world had felt intensely _wrong,_ she'd never allowed herself hope enough to question whether that meant it was also _incorrect._

"I'm not well," Siebren admits. "I know that, even when I don't. I can't… It's there, it's all there, but it's so _fast_ and I have ten pieces of somebody else's hands and it's, it's all fifths and fourths and I can't…"

He blinks rapidly, and Moira's heart splinters a little as she watches him struggle to retain his focus, to keep his mind above the surface of the fugue.

"You _can,_ " she assures him -- assures them both -- resting her hands on the sides of his neck. "You just did. That's not meaningless, Siebren. Nothing you say is meaningless, it's just…nonlinear. Elliptical, yes? You swing out, and then back in again, like a pendulum. But you're not living in a vacuum anymore; the momentum of that pendulum _will_ slow."

He shuts his eyes and shakes his head, breathing through his teeth as his aggravation grows.

" _Ten years,_ " he hisses, "ten years and there's not enough _time_ \-- the signatures are illegible, the bones skin through the stave and they _watched_ and did _nothing!_ "

A loud _crunch_ makes Moira jump, and she looks over to find that the lamp on the sitting room end table has imploded, its base and bulb in pieces, metal harp and socket mangled, and shade crushed into a ring around the shambles.

"Siebren…" She stops short of asking him to calm down, sensing it would be precisely the wrong thing to say. His emotions have been alternately dismissed, gaslit, or pharmaceutically suppressed for years; he has every right to be angry, and she can't take that from him -- but neither can she stand idly by while he brings the house down around their ears. If only her fade worked in such a way that she could do so into him, like an exorcism in reverse -- that she could winker and muzzle and harness his demons through an amalgam of possession and purge.

" _Kut!_ " he curses, hunching into himself and raking his hands over his scalp in frustration. " _Achterlijke fucking kankerautist!_ "

The end table itself goes next, its top trenching into its buckled legs, and when the floorboards beneath it begin to sliver and creak, Moira acts without thinking: she pulls Siebren's hands away from his head and replaces them with her own as she rushes up on her toes to kiss him, hard.

So much for her edict against mixed signals.

Siebren grunts against her mouth in surprise, his whole body stiffening for one of the longest moments of Moira's life, until finally he leans into her with a muffled whine, his fingers twisting fretfully in the fabric of her shirt.

The floorboards cease their groaning, or perhaps it's simply that the volume of her pulse in her ears drowns out all other sounds; either way, she holds the kiss a few seconds longer, just to…just to be sure, until the choice to either deepen or break it absolutely must be made.

Their breath mingles, warm and shaky, against each other's lips. Siebren rests his brow against hers, his eyes closed and skin hot.

"I'm sorry--" he starts.

"No," Moira cuts him off, lowering her hands to his chest to keep the space between them as she finds herself wanting to press closer. "No more apologies, remember? And I never, _ever_ want to hear you talk that way about yourself again, do you understand me?"

"But I--"

" _No,_ " she says again.

Siebren looks at the remains of the end table and lamp, then looks at her, and cringes, probably imagining the same damage done but with a much redder, wetter result.

Moira knows what he's thinking: that this can't keep happening. And really, she agrees. She doesn't want to push him, but he has to realize that any progress to be made with his condition is dependent upon his own initiative -- and that much only for as long as she can keep Akande's expectations of improvement to a minimum.

The resentment that spikes in her chest catches her off-guard -- a crude, almost feral anger that her ability to keep his confidence is in any way constrained -- but she stifles it quickly with a sharp nip of her teeth to the inside of her cheek. It's the oldest thorn in her side, is all -- oversight, in any and all of its myriad forms.

"How's your head?" she asks, as much to change the subject as out of genuine concern. "Any pain? Nausea?"

He looks, for a moment, as if he wants to deny it, but sighs in defeat, and nods.

"How bad, one to ten?"

"…Six."

Intense, but not excruciating. No biotics just yet, then.

"Okay. Do you want to go up and lie down?"

He shakes his head. "Doesn't help. It's just too tight."

"What's too tight?"

"My skull."

Moira frowns, recalling the odd thickness of his cranial sutures, and wonders if he isn't correct. The seams are, technically, fibrous joints, and as such are marginally elastic, continuing to shift, even after they've fused, in tiny increments throughout a person's life. Depending on how his gifts affect his physiology, it's not out of the question that they could be causing just enough of a fluctuation in the compression of his cerebrospinal fluid as to precipitate an alternate swelling or squeezing of the ventricles in his brain. The thickness, then, could be scar tissue, which would paradoxically increase the joints' durability whilst hindering their already very limited range of motion.

Damn it, he needs to let her test him, and soon.

"Stretch out on the sofa," she tells him. "I'll be right there."

He does as she says, and Moira heads to the kitchen to grab an eye mask from the freezer before rejoining him in the sitting room.

"Up a little," she says, and he raises his shoulders so that she can wedge in cross-legged at the end of the elongated sectional, with her back against the armrest and his head on a throw pillow in her lap. "Let me know if this is too cold, or if your pain gets worse."

Siebren closes his eyes as she positions the mask, moaning quietly when her fingers begin to massage his temples, while her thumbs work to unknit the tension in his forehead.

"Good?" she asks.

"Good," he says, and lifts a hand to hold one of her knees, perhaps to keep from idly drifting up into the air, or to ground himself in the moment -- to where he is and who is touching him and why.

Moira, for her part, leaves no inch of his scalp unattended, from his sharp widow's peak to his occipital bone, occasionally switching the gentle pressure of her fingertips for the slow, back-and-forth graze of her nails against his skin, willing his pain and anxiety to abate.

"God, your hands…" he sighs, and Moira smiles, remembering how he knew her by her hands more than any other feature, when she found him. She wonders what she would have known him by, had their positions been reversed. Maybe his eyebrows, although that seems too pat an answer. His smell, perhaps.

Really, though, it's the feel of him that stands out most in her mind when she thinks of him: his heat and solidity and the texture of his skin; the way his shoulder blades fill her palms as if the bones had been cut to measure.

Put that way, the answer seems obvious: he knew her by her hands, and by her hands, she would have known him in turn.

After about twenty minutes, she removes the mask and turns her attention to his orbital bones: frontal, zygomatic, maxima, nasal. His eyelashes, she notices, are as thick and dark as his brows, stark against his pale complexion. What a sight he must have been as a young man, how like a sculpture brought to life; the very epitome of tall, dark and handsome.

He is, of course, still all of those things, but in a different way -- the gloss of obsidian scored into granite, though the cut of the stone remains the same.

"Talk to me?" he asks. "Tell me things. About you."

Moira's eyebrows lift inquiringly. "Do you want lists of mundanities, or moments of particular significance?"

"Yes," he says.

She rolls her eyes. "You're a scientist, Doctor de Kuiper: eliminate some variables."

Siebren's mouth curves in a small smile. "You were born on Valentine's Day. What happened next?"

Moira thinks, and then shrugs. "Several embarrassing fancy dress birthday parties. --Well, at least until I got my hands on an illustrated book of Greco-Roman mythology."

"Oh?"

"Mm. I was a very detail-oriented child -- a stickler for technical accuracy -- and I told my mother that the only way I'd consent to wearing Cupid wings again was if she made me a papier-maché penis to go with them."

Beneath her, Siebren's shoulders jolt with a surprised laugh. "Did she?"

"Alas no, although I think she would have done just to get one over on me, if not for her knowledge of the propensity of six-year-olds to proudly display that which is novel to them. And I was already far more of a tomboy than she would have preferred; I think she was wary of encouraging me any further in that direction, as if nurture is what decides such a thing."

"You dance the path of Daedalus: never the angel, always the arrow."

"No," Moira agrees, unable to fully filter the disdain from her voice, "never the angel."

Siebren opens his eyes, squinting slightly in the low light as he looks up at her, and reaches to cover her blue eye with one hand.

"One is always understudied," he says, "through looking-glass walls."

She blinks down at him with the red, well and truly puzzled by this pronouncement, and is about to request that he elaborate when the doorbell chimes, causing Siebren to wince and Moira to go stockstill in alarm.

She has no deliveries scheduled, but an assassin here, of all places, would have to be uncommonly polite to announce their presence beforehand. Akande? --No; she would have heard the drop ship, and he wouldn't have taken the long way to the island with the type of reinforcements he would feel necessary for Siebren's transport back to the Continent.

That leaves only one possibility, and Moira groans inwardly in annoyance.

"Stay here," she orders, her tone as firm as she can manage without its crossing into ire, and then extricates herself from the sofa and makes her way to the front vestibule, quickening her pace when the doorbell sounds a second time.

Still, she hesitates a moment before undoing the locks, wondering if she might successfully pretend to not be home -- but no, she knows they would only return with reinforcements before too long, and probably a battering ram in the form of a giant barmbrack. Best to get this over with as quickly and quietly as possible, and so Moira takes a breath, smooths down her shirt and hair, and opens the door.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Rei--"

"Och, if it isn't herself! I thought I saw your lights on while I was out walking Millie the other night. 'Look there,' I said to Millie, 'that's Moira's lights on, that is; she must be home,' and here you are now. Why haven't you stopped down Costello's for a pint? Your Blá, she was always one for a pint -- a cordial glass, it looked like, in those hands of hers, but she was a temperate soul, God rest her, one pint and not a swallow more. The lads round here could do with following her example, let me tell you, why just last Thursday little Jamie O'Rourke -- well, not so little anymore, but when half the village is collecting their pensions, he'll always be Little Jamie to us, no matter how many mustaches he grows, just like you, Moira -- not that you have a mustache, of course, dear, but you are looking a mite thin, even for you. Don't they feed you in, where was it, Osmosis?"

"Oasis--"

"Oasis, well, there you have it. It's all liquids, isn't it? I'll bring you round a nice hearty stew -- meat and potatoes, that's what you need, I'll-- Oh. Who's this, then?"

It's not the question Moira doesn't understand so much as the sudden silence, until she follows Mrs. Reilly's gaze and looks back over her shoulder into the house.

Siebren stands at the end of the hall, watching the goings-on through wary, narrowed eyes.

Moira clinches her teeth. If she had to pick a person to inflict upon someone with pre-existing social deficits who hadn't properly interacted with a human being unknown to them for close to a decade, Mrs. Maggie Reilly, who has eighty-six years to her name and has been talking, continuously, for at least eighty-five of them, would be very near the bottom of Moira's list of candidates. Countless donkeys have lost twice as many hind legs to Mrs. Reilly's natterings. Her own husband is down to one -- officially owing to diabetes, but even Moira has her doubts.

"Ah, he's my-- That is, he's… Siebren. His name is Siebren."

"Seabream, like the fish? Huh, that's a new one!"

"No, Siebr--"

"My, he's a tall one, isn't he? Find him in County Antrim, did you? --Oh, but I'm being rude. Introduce us, Moira, go on!"

Moira shakes her head. "No, I don't think that would be wise. He hasn't been feeling well--"

"Oh, go on go on go on! You can't be bringing yer man all the way out to Inishroon and deprive him of the local hospitality!"

"Mrs. Reilly, I really--"

"Seabream!" Mrs. Reilly singsongs, craning around Moira's body in the doorway and wiggling her fingers in a wave. "Hello, love! Don't you listen to Moira, now, she's always been one to stand on ceremony. You can call me Maggie."

Siebren approaches slowly, head tilted, shying from the light, and Moira pushes past a wave of self-consciousness to reach for his arm as he comes to stand beside and just behind her. She's not one for public displays of affection, having rarely been in a relationship substantive enough that they might naturally form, and performing one here, in front of an old woman she wouldn't exactly classify as family, but who used to call her Changeling and save her empty jam jars so that Moira could fill them with whelks and periwinkles during childhood rockpool expeditions, carries with it the distinct feeling that she's _brought someone home with her_ \-- but Siebren's need for an anchor, mentally and physically, is, for the moment, the more pressing concern.

"I like listening to Moira," he says, and Moira refrains from pointing out that he would still be in the sitting room, if that were true. "But I will call you whatever you wish, madam."

The old woman titters, a hand at her heart. "Madam? Goodness me, that's some Old World charm. Where are you from, love?"

"From?" Siebren hesitates, and Moira can feel his shudder better than she can see it. "It...it was very deep…"

"Low, he means," she clarifies, giving his bicep a reassuring squeeze. "The Netherlands. Siebren is Dutch."

"Ooh, a Dutchie! We often get a few of your countrymen during the season. Very considerate people -- a bit parsimonious, but considerate. How did the two of you meet? Have you been together long?"

Moira smiles tightly, and answers before Siebren can attempt to define it in metaphysical terms, "We met some years ago, through work, but have only recently reconnected."

"Aw, that's lovely," Mrs. Reilly coos. "Reminds me of me and my Ned, though of course we never had the chance to lose touch, the both of us native islanders, but it wasn't until I started helping his granny -- you wouldn't remember her, Moira, she died in…'28? '29? -- anyway, it wasn't until I started helping her with the baking that he finally caught my eye -- and speaking of baking, Seabream, you simply _must_ try my barmbrack -- have you ever had a barmbrack, dear? Well, I make the best in the whole county, everyone says so, even the mainlanders! I'll bring you by a loaf when I drop off Moira's stew, how does that sound?"

Siebren, whose head had begun to angle tiredly toward Moira's shoulder during Mrs. Reilly's protracted ramble, snaps suddenly to attention.

"The sounds, yes!" he exclaims with a forward lean, and Moira tenses. "Can you hear it, too? That music…" 

"Music?" Mrs. Reilly frowns, and cocks her head in the direction of the island's tiny church a couple of kilometers to the east. "Goodness me, can you hear the choir practicing all the way out here?"

"Here -- _everywhere!_ As if underwater -- it, it doesn't bypass the ossicles, and yet--"

"Siebren…" cautions Moira.

"--yet it feels as though it drives _straight_ to the skull!" The side of his fist cracks against the door jamb like a hammer, and Mrs. Reilly flinches back in surprise. "Where does it come from? What is it? You must tell me!"

"Ehm, well I… Perhaps, _O Sacred Head, Now Wounded?_ "

"Oh for God's sake," Moira mutters. "Mrs. Reilly, I really think you ought to be going--"

"No!" Siebren protests, eyes wild as he resists the pressure of her free hand urging him back inside the house. "Moira, if she can hear it--"

" _She can't,_ " Moira whispers harshly, cupping her hands over his ears and forcing him to face her, imploring him to understand. "She can't hear it. Siebren, _please._ "

"But she said-- It-- It's _there,_ " he insists. "It's there!"

"I know. I know it is, darling, but Mrs. Reilly doesn't. It was a misunderstanding."

Moira watches the excitement in his face ripple first into confusion, then into turmoil, and then, finally, into shame.

He turns back to Mrs. Reilly, and addresses her somewhere about the knees, "I…I apologise, madam, I thought..."

Moira shoots the old woman a warning look, and to her credit, Mrs. Reilly conjures up a cheerful, if nervous, smile.

"Oh, it's… You're fine, dear. No harm done."

He says nothing to that, and Moira takes his hands in hers. "Why don't you lie down on the sofa again, and I'll be there in a minute, all right?"

He hesitates a moment, but then nods, and she waits until he's disappeared into the sitting room before returning her attention to the nuisance busybody on her doorstep.

"Moira," Mrs. Reilly begins, "what on Earth--"

"Lower your voice, please."

"What in God's name is going on? Has he been drinking?"

Moira snorts. "No, he's not been drinking, and it's none of your concern, regardless."

"It is very much my concern! A man that size away with the fairies, and you, all the way out here, _alone_ with him?"

"It's _fine,_ Mrs. Reilly. I assure you, I'm perfectly capable of handling him."

" 'Handling' him? Why should you need to 'handle' him, what needs 'handling?' "

"That's no concern of yours, I said!" Moira snaps. "All you need to know is that I brought him here so he has a peaceful, secluded environment in which to recover; as such, I really must insist you don't come calling over at random, and I'd appreciate your letting the rest of the village know to keep their distance as well. Siebren is neither a new neighbor to get to know, nor an oddity to gawk at, and I will not see him upset just to break up the boredom of two dozen nebby pensioners!"

"Nebby!" scoffs Mrs. Reilly. "Why, if your great-aunt was alive today--"

"If Aintín Blá was alive today, she'd have chased you off her property with a broom by now, and you know it. We are not to be disturbed, Mrs. Reilly, and that's final."

The old woman huffs in annoyance. "Sure look, I can spread the word, but I amn't about to guarantee anyone'll listen. Bláithín Magorrian's Jackeen great-niece turns up with a fey Dutch leviathan no one's allowed to talk to? Aye, that'll go down a treat down the pub."

"I have every faith in your ability to convince them. And if they show up with torches and pitchforks, I'll know exactly which Culchie old cow to blame, won't I?"

"Culchie old-- _Moira Cecilia O'Deorain!_ "

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Reilly. My regards to Mr. Reilly."

She closes the door on the old woman's indignant spluttering, and her smirk doesn't fade until she enters the sitting room, and finds it empty.

"Siebren?" she calls, only to be met with silence. "Siebren, darling, where are you?"

Further silence, and Moira tamps down on the feeling of unease coalescing in her gut as she checks the kitchen, the dining room, the downstairs bath. Perhaps he's gone upstairs? The hovering can make him damned stealthy at times...

But he's not there, either -- not in either bedroom, or the en suite.

"Siebren?" she calls again. It's not as if there are many places a man his size could conceivably hide -- unless…the wardrobe?

She's just reaching for the ornately carved door when her attention is drawn, for no discernible reason, to the window instead, and she pulls the sheer curtains sharply to one side.

" _There_ you are," she sighs, spotting him out past the back garden, standing at the edge of the bluff -- he must have gone out the side door in the kitchen.

Her relief at locating him, however, is short-lived, all too quickly replaced by a creeping feeling of foreboding at the way he's staring down at the leaden crush of the sea against the rocks some forty meters below.

He wouldn't, she tells herself. She's just got him back, and while yes, it's been a difficult day -- a difficult few days, really; outbursts and disappointments and so much overwhelming _change,_ physical pain and emotional exhaustion -- surely it's not been so terrible, can't have been more harrowing than the nine preceding years and he said it himself that he'd stayed alive for her; it would be senseless for him to do such a thing now they're finally together -- even if they aren't, exactly.

Even if they spend their nights on opposite sides of the same bed, hands linked but bodies separated. Even if today is the first time she's kissed him since they've been here, and that a close-mouthed, last-ditch distraction. Even if she constantly finds herself backing up, pulling away, pretending not to notice the longing in his eyes compound with every small rejection. He always accepts and respects her boundaries, and doesn't press for more than she's prepared to give. He waited for her, and she keeps him waiting still, and for what? He must have his suspicions. He must realize she seeks to buffer, not to rebuff.

Mustn't he?

_"I **understand** , Moira."_

What if what he understands is that it's been too long, that that ship has sailed, that while she may still care for him he's simply too unstable, too dangerous, and in the wake of Mrs. Reilly's visit, too _embarrassing_ for her to want anymore?

_"Things have changed..."_

He has the one thing he wished for more than anything beside him at last, only for her to dance out of reach whenever he seeks to draw her closer, and with no other motive that would be obvious to him except what he has become and been taught to fear, been made to hate, and is helpless to undo.

_"Achterlijke fucking kankerautist!"_

God, could she really have miscalculated so egregiously? Could she have wanted so much to keep from doing as she'd told Akande she would -- to incubate what remnants of personal agency Siebren has left -- that she's been operating with a blind spot as to what he actually needs from her?

 _Don't,_ Moira wills, pressing a hand to the frigid glass as if the gesture could convey the command directly into his mind. _Siebren, don't..._

Damn it, she should be _doing_ something -- should be tearing down the stairs and out the door, should be running, shouting, grabbing for him, demanding to know what the hell he was thinking -- but she can't; she's paralyzed. She can't move, can't breathe, can't blink.

_Please don't..._

All she can do is watch, frozen in place, as he spreads his arms, tips forward, and disappears from view.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A literal cliffhanger, what ho! God I hope this one reads better than it wrote. Getting it out of my brain was an inexplicable grind. @_@
> 
> Chapter title cribbed from Tim Buckley, although if anyone checks it out I'd recommend the version by This Mortal Coil.
> 
> I hope everyone's having a passable quarantine. As I still need to go to work, and have long been a socially isolated person who washes their hands a lot, very little has changed for me, touch wood. Big love to those who are sensibly staying the eff home whenever feasible. <3


	5. Unchained Melody

_Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,_  
_Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on_  
_At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns_  
_Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be_  
_One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial._  
_Wide open, so everything floods in at once._  
_And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,_  
_Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke._  
  


_Tracy K. Smith, My God, It's Full of Stars_

Moira's stomach drops as she stumbles forward, and for an instant she's dizzily surprised to feel the cool, slick grass beneath her socked feet, and the whip of the wind lashing her face and neck -- she's faded, she realizes, entirely without thinking, out past the garden wall, halfway to the bluff.

The second she recovers, she's running, sprinting toward the drop-off so quickly she nearly overshoots it, skidding the last couple of feet to teeter precariously on her toes for a second before she falls back on her heels, falls to her hands and knees and frantically scans the frothing depths below, where the faint hope she'd had of finding him anticlimactically floating only a few meters down is dashed like salt over a suspicious shoulder.

God, where is he? He is -- was -- a strong swimmer; if he managed to miss the rocks…

"Damn it, Siebren, please…"

_There--!_

His head and shoulders breach the surface some ten meters out, but just as quickly, he's swallowed once more in the barrel of a cresting wave. Moira waits with bated breath, but he doesn't bob up again.

She doesn't know what to do. There's no one she can call who could get here in time, and in any case her phone's still in the sitting room -- her plasma reactor, too, not that it would do any good at this range; she'd have to reach him first, and what if he surfaces again while she's in the house, and she misjudges his location completely upon her return?

Fuck, how is she meant to get down to him at all, except--

Except the same way he did.

No. She can't. It would be outlandishly stupid at best, suicide at worst -- but if he's gone into cold shock response, he may already be drowning, and if he hasn't, it will take only minutes for neuromuscular incapacity to set in, and he soon will be.

If she can get to him, she knows how to perform rescue breathing whilst treading water. Could she fade with him back up the cliff side? She can't with others, except Gabriel, but if Siebren's abilities speak, in some way, to her own, then maybe… If he's conscious, too, there's every chance he could levitate them both back to safety -- if he's willing. He doesn't want her hurt; undoubtedly he wouldn't want her dead, even if he's hellbent on his own destruction. He would save himself to save her.

…Wouldn't he?

Moira shakes her head. She hasn't time for indecision -- it's nearly dusk, and once the light goes, so will any appreciable chance she has of finding him before it's too late.

She has to try.

She can't not try.

Focusing on the spot where she saw him last, Moira fists her hands in the grass and fades again, as far beyond the rocks as she can, rematerializing in midair halfway down the cliff side -- and then she's falling, knifing through the spray toward the breakers, with just enough time to clamp a hand tight over her nose and mouth before plunging feet-first into the mercilessly frigid waters of the North Atlantic.

The impact is breathtakingly painful -- not hard, but _sharp,_ as though she's slipped down the icicle-lined gullet of Charybdis. Her throat spasms with the potentially fatal instinct to gasp, but she tucks into herself and waits it out, swallowing repeatedly to stabilize the reflex before she risks removing her hand from her face.

Opening her eyes feels like the cold is attempting to bore through them and into her brain, and she squints against the ache as she spreads her arms to push herself deeper and twist herself around, her movements hampered by the heavy drag of her woollen clothes in the water. The overcast early evening does her no favors, either, made worse by the involuntary contraction of her pupils in the cold: everything is a mass of undulating shadows, further convoluted by dark tangles of eeling kelp that look almost mockingly human in the many-layered gloom. Somewhat oddly, her mind flashes back to her undergrad days -- in particular, to her History of Modern Medicine course and its VR tours of primitive medical facilities, one of which had been of her university itself a hundred years prior, where its dozens of donated cadavers awaited dissection in massive tanks of cloudy formalin. Full of youthful bluster in addition to her native insensitivity, Moira had made a tasteless crack about it being Hell's own aquarium, to which her instructor had wordlessly altered the simulation to place Moira herself in the middle of the throng of bloated bodies she'd just disparaged -- a lesson, she was informed amidst her startled thrashing, in respecting the contributions of the dead to her education.

She shivers now, both at the memory and because she can't not, it's so fucking goddamn cold. Even the burn of her lungs for want of air feels like a pile of dry ice in the basket of her ribs, and already a dangerous numbness is biting into her limbs -- her kicks to the surface are clumsy, uncoordinated things, and once there she scarcely manages to snatch a breath before she meets the swell of a wave head-on, flooding her nose and the back of her throat with seawater. 

She chokes and sputters, struggling to remain afloat, and dark stars of pain to burst behind her eyes as the back of her left shoulder slams into something rough and unyielding, driving the bone from the socket and the remaining air from her lungs -- one of the rocks she'd thought herself so fortunate to have avoided, only for the current to have pushed her back into them regardless.

Her right hand scrabbles for purchase -- if she can pull herself up, if she can just get a breath -- but it's too slippery, and her nails and fingertips only scrape uselessly against the stone before she's rolled back down into the murk.

A voice at her shoulder, one she hasn't heard in years, tuts in disapproval, "You're dying, _Iarlais._ "

_Yes,_ Moira thinks, _thank you, I'm well aware._

"Don't get shirty with me, girl; I've nothing to do with it."

_You're distracting me._

"From what, pray tell?"

_From thinking how not to!_

"It's rather out of your hands at this point, don't you think?"

_No._

"You're freezing, and you're injured, and you're weak."

_I am not weak!_

"Your battery is low, and it's getting dark."

_Shut up. I can…_ She blinks rapidly against the darkness swarming the edges of her vision like blowflies to an open wound. _Just shut up!_

"Moira. Turn around."

Moira hesitates, but her obedience to this voice in particular is too well-ingrained, and against her better judgement, she does as she's told.

The action is easier than it ought to be, as if the water has thinned, although she's still floating. It's warmer now, too, and she tries not to think about what either of those things might mean.

Bláithín Magorrian floats in front of her, gimlet-eyed and severe, her long gray hair fanning out behind her in steely fronds like lionfish fins.

"Aintín...?" The word doesn't bubble when it leaves Moira's mouth.

Her great-aunt wrinkles her brow in the same wryly indifferent way as she'd done when she'd given to five-year-old Moira a fireplace poker with which to defend herself against the monster that had taken up residence under her bed.

Moira shakes her head. "You're not real."

"No?"

"No. You're dead. Your funeral was open-casket because everybody wanted to be sure. What you are is...is a hallucination triggered by the stress of my current predicament. A comforting dissociation."

"You conjured _me_ as your source of comfort?" Aintín Blá scoffs, thoroughly unimpressed. "I should have left my house to one of your _oínseach_ sisters, if you're really that thick -- although I confess that that…modernist abomination you had added on round the back should have been my first clue."

Moira scowls. "Well, I would have designed the lab to your aesthetic specifications, but I'm afraid they simply don't make tatty knitted tea cozies for confocal microscopes in as great a number as they used to."

"Cheeky little _dailtín._ Don't think because I'm dead I can't still gain access to your arse and a wooden spoon."

"Oh? Borrow one from Saint Lawrence's kitchen, will you, you carnaptious old hag?"

They glare at one another, and Moira cracks first, hiding a laugh in a huff, and a small, satisfied smirk settles in the grooves of Aintín Bla's weathered face -- the softest expression Moira ever knew her to wear, even in life.

"So what is this, then, if not an acute psychotic episode?" she asks. "Did you eat the heads off all the other dead Magorrians until they agreed to let you take over as clan banshee?"

Aintín Blá arches a grizzled eyebrow. "Have I sung at you yet?"

"I don't think I've heard the dulcet tones of a bellowing foghorn recently, no."

"A box about the ears and you'll be begging to hear anything at all. But no, usually the keening tends to fall under the sopranos' purview. Voices like Ned Reilly's fiddle three shandies deep, the lot of them."

Moira smiles, knowing exactly the screechy pitch of her great-aunt's disdain, and her begrudgery about it as nubby and familiar as Dolly's worn-off wool.

"I've missed you," she admits. "So much."

"And I you, girl."

"So there is something. --After."

"Before. After. During. There's always _something._ "

"Heaven?" Moira asks. "…God?"

"Hah! Wouldn't you like to know, _Minister?_ But I will say I don't consider the time I spent in prayer to have been wasted. You may take that however you wish. You always did, anyway."

"A lost cause from the first, was I?"

"Lost? No. A cause unto yourself, perhaps. Never the angel--"

"--always the arrow." Moira's mouth twists in a sardonic moue. "A weapon where love should be."

"Dramatic in our death throes, aren't we? You speak as if the two haven't been historically interchangeable. The Greeks considered love a form of madness from the gods. Your Santiago, I'm sure, would hold an opinion on that."

"My Sant-- You mean Siebren." Moira's chest tightens painfully at the thought of him -- of the myriad ways she's failed him that her presence here proves.

"Sure I do, your fishy fellow. Not quite the full shilling, is he? But I imagine anyone taken with you is bound to be a bit of a quare hawk."

"With respect, Aintín, _do_ fuck off."

Aintín Blá blinks, but appears neither surprised nor offended by Moira's words. "Struck a nerve, have I?"

"You've no right to dismiss him like that. You don't know a damn thing about him."

"Don't I? I know you well enough, sulky little selkie that you are."

"And what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

The ache in Moira's chest grows stronger -- an awful, rhythmic pressure, like someone's stamping on her heart, and when she lifts a hand to her sternum, her shoulder screams with a pain that makes her gasp and bends her double.

"Is it all the staring into microscopes that's turned you so myopic? God Almighty, open your _eyes,_ child!"

Moira shakes her head. The pain is searing -- _suffocating._ She can barely breathe through it.

"Moira," says Aintín Bla, her voice firm, but fading, as if being somehow ferried away. " _Moira._ Open your eyes."

_I can't._

"You can. You must."

_It hurts._

"Of course it does: it's life. _Gairum augus coisricim thú, m'uan._ You have so many songs still to hear -- but not mine. Not yet."

* * *

Moira's eyes fly open in a confusion of several conflicting agonies, the most demanding of which is a wrenching spasm from her diaphragm that arches her back in a hard gag. She's rolled onto her on her side at once, where she retches violently, tasting seawater and bile, and choking on deep, wet coughs between heaves.

" _Godzijdank,_ " a deep voice sighs in relief above her, while big hands hold her steady and rub her back in soothing circles until her reflexes start to calm. "Good, good girl. All of it out, now, all of it… Good…"

When her breathing is raspy but even, she's sat up on the grass, and turns her face to see Siebren kneeling beside and bowed over her, shielding her as well as he can from the biting wind, his face lined with concern.

"You are okay?" he asks.

"C-cold," Moira hisses through chattering teeth.

He nods, and moves to gather her back up in his arms, but freezes at her startled cry of pain. "Moira?"

She shakes her head, her face pale. "Just get us inside," she says tightly.

Siebren does as she says, doing his best not to jostle her as he lifts her, wincing when she gasps regardless.

The way back to the house is smooth, at least, his toes barely brushing the grass as he floats them to the kitchen, where he gingerly sets her down on the bar worktop.

"Scissors," she grits out. "Top drawer, left of the sink."

She doesn't need to tell him what to do with them, the way she's cradling her left arm with her right making it clear enough where the problem lies. Siebren cuts her shirt from hem to collar, and helps to carefully peel the sleeves from her arms before tossing the waterlogged fabric into the sink.

His face loses a shade at the sight of her left shoulder, where the top of her humerus protrudes beneath the skin, obviously dislocated.

"Tell me," he says.

Moira hitches her chin toward the other side of the bar. "Over there. ...Okay. Okay. Help me extend my arm -- _slowly --_...okay, stop, stop. Good. Um."

She licks her lips and tries to think back over the numerous times she's performed this procedure on others -- in the field, more often than not, working on adrenalized autopilot, with pain relegated to a tertiary concern at best, even for the person experiencing it. It's extraordinarily different from this perspective, battered and bruised and halfway to hypothermia, with her thoughts sticking like too-loose shoes in the combined morass.

"You'll...you'll have to push down and in on the tubercle -- the, ah, the ball -- with one hand, and up on my elbow with the other, while rotating my arm toward my body, like -- like a rudder. Understand?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

" _Yes,_ Moira."

"Good. Don't-- Don't jerk it, but for the love of God don't hesitate. You should be able to feel the socket as you go; you just have to f-firmly roll it in."

"I understand. Are you ready?"

She nods quickly and grips the edge of the worktop with her right hand, and tries to relax through the hard shivers wracking her frame.

"Do it."

Siebren swallows dryly, and rests one hand overtop the bulge in her shoulder, then wraps the other tightly around the crook of her arm, cupping her elbow against his palm and positioning his fingers and thumb so that he can leverage the angle.

"On three," he tells her. "One, two--"

"-- _Sweet Mother of Divine,_ " she hisses, her breaths turning shallow and fast.

Siebren ignores her, the whole of his focus on the task at hand. He's not as strong as he used to be, but it's muscle memory that's of greater importance in this, and years of running gloved simulations in a lab combined with an even greater number of hours spent seated in front of a piano still give him an unshakable edge when it comes to working by a careful balance of spatial awareness and touch. He won't be required to use much force if he can manipulate things just-so -- if he can find where the socket _wants_ to be fed the bone, then with one good push, it should--

A dull but satisfying pop accompanies Moira's strangled cry, and she releases the worktop to convulsively grip at his shirt as she hides her face against his shoulder.

" _Stil nou, stil,_ " Siebren soothes, rubbing her back and kissing the top of her head, her temple. "The piglet is all washed now, yes? Shhh, shh shh…"

In a few moments, the pain begins to ebb more than it flows, and Moira sighs in relief, and relaxes against him. She's briefly confused to feel him shift slightly away from her, but a second later, something warm and soft descends upon her bare upper body -- the old sealskin blanket, she recognizes, from the back of the sitting room sofa.

"You're all right," Siebren murmurs, and Moira can't tell which of them the words are meant to comfort; when he tips her face up to look at him, she finds his expression equally uncertain.

"God, Moira, what were you thinking?" he asks, smoothing back her still-dripping hair. "You could have died."

Moira stiffens, as stunned by the admonishment as if he'd questioned why she didn't think to use her gills, if she felt like taking a dip?

" _I_ could have--?" she repeats, pulling away from him. " _I?_ I'm not the one who threw myself off the fucking bluff!"

"Didn't you?" Siebren frowns, and flinches back when she waves him off with a disgusted sound.

"You know what I mean! How could you do something like that? How could you think that -- that you had no other options?"

He shakes his head, blinking in apparent confusion.

"I didn't... I-I didn't think you would mind," he offers lamely, and Moira gapes at him, appalled.

"Of _course_ I would mind! For fuck's sake, do you think because I've gone through it once already, I could bear to do it again? Knowing that this time, it was your choice, and that I wasn't-- That you -- you felt like you couldn't even _talk_ to me?"

"No, I-- I _can_ talk to you, I just--"

"I know I've been keeping you at arm's length, but that doesn't mean I _want_ to, I just don't know what else to do when you're _like this!_ "

The silence that follows her confession rings in the air like the shriek of an overboiling kettle, and Siebren looks suddenly ill; looks suddenly as though she's slapped him.

"…If I could be any other way--"

"No, that's--" Moira cuts him off, covering her face with one hand. "Damn it, I didn't… I didn't mean that the way it sounded. You're…" She swallows, firming her mouth against a slight tremor in her bottom lip. "You're wonderful," she says, her low voice frayed at the edges with a higher, rougher sound. "You've always been wonderful."

" _Stertje…_ " He reaches for her, but pulls back his hand, fingers curling, when she recoils. "…I'm sorry. I should have… All I could think was that I _had_ to hear it. I had to know if…if it would be different, somehow, in different densities."

"Different?"

"The music. Underwater. I thought, if it was different, then I could know if…if it's real or…if I really am 'away with the fairies.' "

…Oh.

Oh, God.

God, she's an idiot -- she didn't even consider…

_That it might have nothing to do with you, you vain fool? That while your memory may have consoled him, he wasn't so daft as to actually be waiting for you?_

"…You can't _do_ that," she tells him, relief, frustration and embarrassment all competing for authorship of the scarlet flush now burning her cheeks. "I thought--" Moira shakes her head. "Nevermind what I thought, you can't just _do things_ as you think of them and not tell me!"

Siebren's brow furrows. "What did you think?"

"It's not important," she maintains, but he's latched onto it now -- comprehension is already dawning in his eyes, and with it, a growing horror.

"You thought that I--"

"Stop."

"--that I would rather not be here than not be with--"

"Just shut up, Siebren!" she snaps. "Yes, I was wrong, _obviously;_ you needn't--"

She bites the sentence off at its knees, her jaw tightening against the indignity of the pity and dismay that linger in his face.

Holding the blanket closed around her shoulders with her injured arm, Moira eases herself awkwardly down from the bar with the other, stiffening when Siebren automatically moves to help her, should she falter or fall, but he has sense enough, at least, to stop short of actually making contact.

"I can't," she says, keeping her voice flat and her gaze askance, "I can't think right now, I'm... I'm going to shower. You should get changed. Warm up. Unless of course you've changed your mind about catching your death."

It's a petty jab, and she knows it, but she doesn't wait for his response before retreating from the kitchen, leaving him dripping seawater on the tiles, alone.

* * *

In the upstairs en-suite, Moira angrily twists on the taps in the shower before doffing her blanket and retrieving the scissors from her nail kit, muttering under her breath all the while.

"Fucking music... Gone for a fucking swim, of all the absurd…"

A hard shiver, caused as much by barely-contained fury as by cold, makes her teeth chatter, and she clenches her jaw and exhales hard through her nose, willing her body to relax enough to allow for the coordination necessary to trim back the ragged, rock-ripped remains of the claws on her right hand.

"Shit!" she hisses, snipping one too close to the bed, and throws the scissors against the countertop in frustration, only to curse again when the movement jars her shoulder. She should have picked up her reactor before her dramatic flounce up the stairs, but like hell is she going back down for it now, and so she fishes two of Siebren's painkillers from the bottle in the medicine cabinet instead, and downs the dose with a palmful of water from the tap.

The thought that he might need one himself, if his headache still hasn't abated, gives her pause when she moves to put the bottle back.

She really, really doesn't want to give a single damn about him right now, and she's vindictive enough to almost believe it when she tells herself that she only cracks open the en-suite door and tosses the bottle on the bed because she doesn't want him to come looking for them, doesn't want to see his worried eyes and humiliatingly compassionate face until tomorrow morning at the earliest.

She skins out of her trousers and socks and steps carefully into the shower, the tepid water feeling close to scalding to her half-frozen nerves.

Working shampoo into her hair one-handed, she squeezes her eyes shut against the intrusive memory of Siebren's fingers pushing her wet hair out of her face, of his lips on her forehead and his gentle reassurances that she's okay.

She's not okay. None of this is okay. She's living with a half-mad man who, in truth, she barely knows, who nonetheless affects her to the extent that the possibility -- the mere _suggestion_ \-- of losing him a second time all but annihilated her capacity for rational thought.

"Damn him," she spits, turning her face up into the spray when a few shampoo suds find their way into her eyes, making them burn and sting. Her chest hurts, too -- complements, no doubt, of Siebren's panicked efforts to revive her -- and her throat, from the retching and the coughing, when he was successful.

She has no face-saving excuse for the sounds -- the choking hiccups and tight, thin keens -- but she smothers them as best she can, hiding against the wall with a hand to her mouth, feeling like she's drowning all over again.

She can't do this.

She can't _behave_ like this -- their situation is too precarious, its potential consequences too deadly.

Siebren was right: she could have died today, and over nothing more serious than a misunderstanding and lack of impulse control under the most mundane set of circumstances either are liable to ever encounter together. 

It's ridiculous.

_She's_ ridiculous.

"Get a grip," she orders herself, digging her nails into her palms and forcing herself to breathe. "Get a fucking grip and _cop -- the fuck -- on."_

Tomorrow, she decides: formal efforts toward his rehabilitation will begin in earnest tomorrow. She'll insist on it. The sooner he can fully take care of and control himself, the better -- his weaknesses cannot be her own.

Steadier now with something of a stratagem in mind, Moira mechanically finishes her shower, wraps herself in a soft, clean bath sheet, and opens the door to the bedroom.

Siebren isn't there, but her reactor is -- on the bed, where the pill bottle was but isn't anymore -- along with a penitent mug of tea, still steaming, on the farthest bedside table -- her side's bedside table.

Numbly, she slips on the reactor's left gauntlet and turns it on, grimacing slightly at the activation of the needles in its interior sheath, but the minor discomfort is quickly replaced by a warm, vital rush as the nanites perfuse her bloodstream, alleviating and enlivening her overstressed system.

It being the worst of her injuries, the deep ache in her shoulder abates first, followed by the tightness in her lungs, the cramping of her muscles, and finally the hot, swollen feeling behind her eyes.

She switches off the reactor and removes the gauntlet, and the four small puncture wounds it leaves behind knit scarlessly closed in a little over a second. When she rotates her shoulder, the joint feels sensitive, but secure; Siebren did well in putting it back together.

He did well with the tea, too, she notices, taking a sip. It's sweeter than she usually takes it, but the extra sugar is likely supplemental -- a boost of glucose to offset any lingering metabolic energy losses. It's an annoyingly considerate addition, in light of his recent actions, that annoyingly subverts her ability to be annoyed with him at all.

The last of her anger dissipates in a long and heavy sigh, and fatigue and remorse waste little time in spilling over into the mental hollows it leaves behind.

He didn't deserve to be given out to like that, no matter how she felt.

And really, it's a good thing, a good sign, that he felt compelled to seek out an answer for his own edification, even if his manner of seeking left a great deal of cautionary measures and practicality and basic self-regard to be desired -- not that Moira herself can honestly claim strict adherence to only formally sanctioned methodologies.

_Always the arrow…_

She hadn't even thought to ask him what results his experiment had yielded.

Setting the mug aside, Moira towels herself dry and pulls on her nightclothes, and then brushes her teeth before heading quietly downstairs.

She finds him in the kitchen, seated at the bar, his own mug of tea cupped between his large, slightly shaky hands. He's done as she said, and changed into dry things. The worktop and floor, too, have been wiped clean of all traces of their maritime misadventure.

"Siebren," she says from the threshold.

He turns his head, giving her the attention of his right ear and peripheral vision.

Moira holds out a hand.

"Come to bed."

His broad shoulders rise and fall with a silent sigh -- of relief, she thinks.

She hopes.

After a moment's hesitation, he takes her hand, and allows her to lead him upstairs, leaving his mug on the worktop.

Moira climbs into bed from his side of the mattress, curls up in the center, and pulls him to join her there, folding his arm over her waist and twining their fingers together beneath the duvet.

Siebren is quiet for a long time, and then whispers solemnly against the nape of her neck, "I wouldn't. Ever."

Moira closes her eyes and squeezes his hand, steeling herself for the impending elaboration, be it apologetic or accusatory…

…but the seconds tick past, and it never comes -- no scolding her logic, or lack thereof; no censure of her ego, or devotional minimizing of his own. He leaves the wound unsalted and lets the promise stand alone, assigning neither blame nor credit, and implying no demands for either in return.

He lets her be.

"Good," she whispers back, meeting him in the same unspoken middle, and nestles gratefully into the warm wall of his chest when he tightens his arm around her. "I-- ...Good."

* * *

Her sleep is a deep, dreamless void, warm, dark, and placid as a womb, and she wakes to sense a crispness in the air specific to sunny autumn mornings -- a sharp form of coziness that brightens the mind even as the body rejects any thought but that of remaining indefinitely bundled.

She's warm and safe and clearer-headed than she's felt in a long, long time, and she remembers waking up in this bed as a very young child, contentedly picking at Dolly's wool, alert and a little hungry, but carefree, idly fascinated by the timing of her great-aunt's stertorous snores and the way they perfectly filled the quiet gaps between susurrant lappings of the surf at the base of the bluff far below, as though the rhythm of one dictated that of the other.

There's no snoring now, and the tall, broad body beside her is certainly not Aintín Blá's, but the rhythm remains in the form of a featherlight touch across her ribs: her shirt has ridden up during the night, and Siebren's hand that she'd fallen asleep holding rests now on the hot skin of her stomach, his thumb brushing back and forth in time with the distant waves, grazing the underside of her right breast with every gentle pass.

"Siebren…" she says, her voice husky and soft from sleep.

His thumb stills, and he presses his brow to the back of her neck -- contritely, she thinks, but he doesn't pull away, even as he seems to be waiting for her to do so.

He offers no resistance as Moira takes his hand in hers and removes it from her stomach -- but then why would he, when it's she who's been the resistant one thus far?

Indeed, in light of yesterday's overreaction and Siebren's promise, she should find it easier to live in accordance with the boundaries she's established between them.

She should find it easier, and yet despite all of her misgivings, it doesn't feel like weakness when she guides his hand to the swell of her breast and holds it there, the nipple peaking against his palm.

She should find it easier, and yet wanting him has always been easier still -- then and now; like this and not.

Siebren tenses, perhaps uncertain if he's slipped back into dreaming. For several moments, he simply holds her, unmoving, before he finally exhales unevenly between her shoulder blades, and flexes his fingers to knead her gently. His mouth presses softly, experimentally against the side of her throat, and when she makes no move to stop him, he draws the delicate skin between his lips to taste her fully.

Moira sighs, her eyes falling shut as a deep throb of arousal pulses at the convergence of her thighs, and reaches up to stroke the nape of his neck and base of his skull. He's so warm, warm and solid and alive against her back, his right leg warm where it's bent between hers, and she hooks a foot around his calf, urging his leg up so she can grind down against his thigh.

His chest rumbles with a quiet groan, and he snakes his other arm between the mattress and her midsection to enfold her completely, hugging her flush against him and letting her feel the hard length of his erection straining through his trousers against the cleft of her ass.

"My star," he whispers, the words ghosting hot across her ear, sparking a shiver that runs the full length of her spine. "The prettiest... Wished on you…for you…"

He trades her breast from his right hand to his left, and slides the former down her stomach and beneath the waistband of her joggers to cup her cunt. The delicate drag of his fingertips over the gusset of her underwear makes Moira's breath catch, makes her twitch and quiver and ache with an intensity she hadn't known before him and, until now, hasn't known since.

"Yes," she breathes, "Siebren--"

Whatever else she might have said remains a mystery even to her, lost in her short, sharp gasp when his hand dips behind the thin cotton to skate one deft finger along the damp seam of her sex, the hot digit skimming lightly over her clit as the pad traces her entrance in soft, beckoning circles. She bites her lip on a whimper, bracing one knee against the mattress and tipping forward to rock her hips into the touch, every quick, small stroke teasing bright threads of pleasure through the eye of every nerve in the lining of her skin.

The immediacy of her orgasm takes her by surprise, flash-boiling her senses as the low, hot flicker in her belly flares and branches, like lightning, from her core to her extremities, and she feels, for an indeterminate number of seconds, as though she's back in the ocean, tempest-tossed and spinning in the hollow of a breaking wave, both enveloped by and outside of a swirling something so much larger than herself that she's a fool for ever having thought she could outswim it.

And again, he finds her there; catches and cradles her as his circles slow and the rush subsides, until she's little more than a lambent, liquid assemblage of softly pulsing limbic echoes. His lips flutter against the curve of her neck all the while, spilling a rapid babble of Dutch too hushed and fast for her to follow, but she catches _ster_ and _lief, mijn, gewacht,_ and her name -- over and over again, like a plainchant, like a psalm, "Moira, Moira, Moira, God--" and she twists around in the tight circle of his arms to crush her mouth openly, urgently against his.

The next few moments are a breathless stirabout of chaotic kisses and frenzied hands, of clothing bunched and stretched and kicked down alongside the bedding, and when at last they're both skin to skin she wraps a leg around his waist and reaches between them to loosely stroke his cock, hot and silky and pounding with the quick, clipped beats of his heart. Siebren closes his eyes, his big hands gripping hard at her shoulder and the back of her thigh as he pants against her lips.

"Stop," he gasps, "stop--" and Moira does, releasing his shaft to rest her hand on his stomach, wondering if he's going to spend himself all over hers. It wouldn't upset her -- he's ten years touch-starved; he could have finished the instant he pressed up against her and she would have been glad to have so relieved him -- but when he opens his eyes, they're as frantic with distress as they are dark with desire.

"What's wrong?" she asks.

Siebren swallows, working up the words, and it takes a conscious effort for Moira to keep herself from physically soothing him with a hand to his cheek or a tightening of her embrace while she waits for him to speak.

"Do you really want this?" he finally asks, and she blinks, nonplussed, wondering how her consent, of all things, has managed to elude him.

"Of course I do. I wouldn't--"

"No," he interrupts, "I mean, do you want… _me?_ Or do you want to do this _for_ me? --Because of yesterday. What you thought. Because I'm...like this."

The question, Moira discovers, stings all the more for how obviously guileless it is. She's well accustomed to having her intentions labeled as suspicious, and often rightly so, but there's no accusation in Siebren's tone, nor even some subtle plea for reassurance. He wants her so badly, but not if she's only relented to assuage her own guilt at having earlier chosen to deny him. She's been so hesitant thus far to do anything he might later construe as manipulative, and here he is, fearful that his condition might be manipulating her in turn.

He really does love her, she realizes -- not whatever idea of her helped sustain him throughout his confinement, or some delusional pipe dream of being able to live out the rest of their lives repeating the perfection of a single night, but _her_ \-- here, now, as a person unto herself, whether she truly wishes to act upon her feelings, or decides it would be best to further suppress them.

He is Pythagoras spaghettified into a Pythia, his very thoughts stretched and spun like threads of fairyfloss to leave his mind a flyaway fantasia of morphing maths and myths, like the netting knotted around the miasmic Omphalos once devoured and expelled by the ravages of time personified. _Theia mania:_ madness from the gods.

All this, and still he loves her through a lens of reality often absent from relationships where the sanity of both parties has never once been oppugned.

All this, and he would sooner accept her honest refusal than an invitation issued in the throes of emotional ambivalence, even as she's draped around him, warm and soft and willing.

"I want you," she affirms, giving in to the desire to reach up and stroke his face, smoothing one of his eyebrows with her thumb. "All of you. How you were, how you are, however you will be: I want you."

Siebren lets out a breath she suspects he's been holding for a decade, and her heart sketches an erratic, mothlike path between her belly and her breast as he kisses her with new intensity, his low groan buzzing against the roof of her mouth. She urges him onto his back with a hand against his chest, and kneels astride his waist before reaching down between them to take hold of him again. Siebren bucks once into her hand, inhaling sharply through his nose, and follows her up when she sits back to guide him slowly, slickly inside.

" _God--_ " he grunts, his eyes fluttering closed and breath hitching in his throat, overwhelmed by sensations that have for so long been withheld from him. "You...you feel…"

His hands move across her back and waist and shoulders and buttocks, grasping and pressing in turns as if to confirm her actuality.

"Tell me -- tell me this is real?"

"It's real, _a mhuirnín,_ " Moira assures him, running her fingers through the short, soft bristles of his hair and tracing the sensitive helices of his ears with her thumbs. "This is real. I'm real. I've got you."

He looks up at her, his dusky eyes shining with the same astonished and astonishing trust that had so long ago thrown her heart for that most unexpected and wonderful of loops, and a piece of their first encounter ricochets off the back of her memory to insinuate itself into the present:

"Just let me take care of you."

He shivers at her words, and she kisses him again, savoring his taste and his heat and the sweet glide and stretch of his body moving within hers when she at last begins to rock against him. It feels so good, so _right_ \-- the way he fits and fills her, his long arms looped securely around her torso and pulling her in against him in tandem with the subtle rolls of her hips.

"I've got you," she says again, one unvoiced word meiotically dividing on her tongue into many: "You're here, with me; this is real, and you're mine. You belong to me. You _belong,_ " and Siebren _whines_ \-- a resonant, hungry, vulnerable chord that acts upon her heart like a hammer to a bell; she can feel it trilling, she thinks, in the very marrow of her bones.

It isn't long before his breathing harshens, and the muscles in his thighs start to tense and tremble. Pinheads of sweat glitter on his brow and at his temples, and his gaze grows increasingly fervent as his desperation begins to outpace his control.

"Moira…" he pleads, and "Yes, darling," she whispers, clutching him close, pressing her cheek to his. "Siebren, my Siebren, just let go; it's all right, I've got you, let go--"

He grapples her tighter and hides his face in the crook of her neck, and Moira gasps, a feverish wave of pleasure rippling through her again just to feel him shudder and pulse as he succumbs, to hear the rough moans edging his every breath and feel his heart beating hard and fast in perfect parallel with her own.

She has him.

They have each other.

Downstairs, forgotten and unheard on the armchair in the sitting room, her phone begins to ring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I hope the content of this chapter makes up for its tardiness, ahem. >///>; But I promise my geriatric updating pace in no way reflects any waning interest in this story. Also, finally, FINALLY the next chapter will see Siebren get his turn at the perspective helm, if you've been at all looking forward to that.
> 
> The all-important credits: Aintín Blá references Pratchett, Hemingway, and quotes the Mars Rover. "Unchained Melody" was written by the Righteous Brothers, but again, I recommend a cover version -- the one by Crywolf ft. Roniit is both a first class reimagining of the song itself, as well as one of the most poignantly beautiful duets of all time, imo.
> 
> If you've got this far, thank you so much for reading, and waiting, and then waiting longer, and especially if you commented in the interim and I failed to reply -- I do deeply appreciate every single one, and will try not to let that get away from me again in future. <3


	6. Dissonance of Dichotomy, Oceans Pt. II

_Counsel yourself cautiously_   
_Be clairvoyant_   
_Alone for a second_   
_So as to be a hole_   
_Very lost_   
_Carry this further_   
_Think right_   
_Muffle the sound_   
  


\--Erik Satie, performance directions for Gnossienne № 3

* * *

  
Siebren's never believed in soulmates, not in the way commonly espoused by hopeless romantics and New Age gurus. Even before he was pitilessly swallowed and spat back up by that most mysterious of cosmic phenomena, he'd never harbored any delusions that the universe gives a damn about whether its components find their functions fulfilling -- only that said functions are indeed fulfilled. Whenever queried in regard to his philosophical views, he would shrug and deem himself essentially deterministic: of the belief that causal inevitability has been in effect since the barbed beak of Being tore through the shell of whatever cosmogenic egg occupied the unknowable space before space, and that every action and reaction, from the formation of galaxies to the intermingling of chemicals involved in the production of human thought, has been informed by the very first mathematical dominoes to have fallen at the dawn of time, with this and all other moments decided, if not designed, aeons in advance of their occurrence, from axiom to anno Domini. For any other outcome, another universe is required, ad infinitum.

That said, in this one, Moira's name means fate: the only other force in the universe as immutable and inescapable as gravity. If he has come to embody the one, who else could he be destined for but the one who defines the other?

If she felt like a revelation to him ten years ago, she feels nothing short of miraculous now -- a pleasure so profound, it's almost pain, like a rollover fire churning against the ceiling of his skin.

They spend the whole of the morning in bed, reacquainting themselves with each other's slopes and angles, creases and scars. She lets him explore her at his leisure, without boundaries or requirements, and he scents and strokes and tastes his way from the soles of her feet to the shells of her ears, moving from one point to another in no particular order, lifting and turning here, stretching and folding there, running his fingertips over the luminous lineation that hovers just above her skin to watch the fine, downy hairs lift at the promise of his touch like iron filings to a magnet. The only time he senses her slight reluctance to his investigations is when he examines her right arm and hand -- not shame, per se, but wariness, as if he's testing the edge of a sharpened blade, or inspecting the barrel of a gun. He kisses both reverently, and looks her in the eye as he does, to show that he is not, cannot be afraid of any part of her or what she has become. The discolored skin there is completely smooth, cool against his lips, and the veins in her wrist beneath his thumb are as stiff as the tendons -- from atrophy or augmentation, he isn't sure.

It hardly matters. They are, as he is, still hers, corruption and all.

Her own part in the proceedings is circumspect, content to observe his curiosity, and the choices he makes, and the way he moves. She smiles, bites her lip, laughs as the current area of study inspires, sometimes reaching to stroke an affectionate hand over his hair, or else hold onto him for balance as he arranges her to his liking. She watches him like an animal as he poses her like a doll, and yet he's never felt more acutely aware of his own humanity, or more appreciative of another's.

He discovers she has a small pulse point just below her navel that visibly jumps when she lies on her back. It hastens beneath his palm as his tongue traces the crease where her abdomen meets her left thigh, and he remembers the way she'd teased him when he'd asked for her hands, building his anticipation with the lightest of touches, working him into an aching, needful frenzy with the slowest, until the first sweet pull of her mouth had been enough to undo him.

With this in mind, he stays near to her sex, but keeps his attentions peripheral, while his hands roam her body more widely, caressing her breasts, her stomach and sides, her calves, and the backs of her knees. He charts the few freckles that dust her hips and inner thighs with his mouth, kissing or gently biting at the darker ones, and drawing lines between them with his tongue before blowing softly on her skin as if to dry the ink.

She's as patient as she can be, trying not to twist herself into his path, or otherwise urge him along any other. Her fingers knot the sheets, and her heels roll into his back, but only when she's flushed with frustration and shuddering so steadily beneath him that he can no longer pick out her heartbeat amidst her tremblings does he touch her directly.

A sharp gasp escapes her at his first glancing lick across her hood, and she grabs for him, fingers splayed, barely managing to catch herself on the taut wire strung between impulse and restraint, and it takes only a few full, curling strokes between her folds, his upper lip soft on her clit, to make her spasm against his tongue, a low moan like a startled laugh shaking loose from the arching column of her throat.

 _"I eat the light and it tastes like you"_ \-- like the alchemy of their intimacy, heady and bright as Riesling grapes sprung from a copper vine.

This time, after Moira drags him by his shoulders back up to her mouth for a grateful kiss, he turns her over, spreads her legs and sinks eagerly inside her with a bone-deep shiver of relief. He doesn't feel quite as he did earlier, sharp-set and nearly fit to burst at the first perfect hug of her body around his, but it's still an extraordinarily intense sensation, not least because he is at present the one in command of the experience. He has existed for so long at the cross-section of giving and being taken that his mind momentarily stumbles on the concept that he is allowed, now, to also take for himself -- that his actions are not merely tolerated, but encouraged.

"Siebren?" Moira asks softly, reaching back to touch his shoulder when his hesitancy lasts longer than a handful of breaths. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," he says. "Yes, I just... I want you."

It's such a stupid, obvious thing to say, but somehow it's the only explanation he finds himself able to offer her.

"You have me," she tells him.

 _Yes,_ he thinks, nodding to himself -- yes, of course, he need only--

" _Oh..._ " she sighs as he pulls back, sliding almost fully out before pushing forward again to the deliciously familiar sting of her nails in his skin when her fingers kink against the flesh of his back.

_"Quickly," she'd hissed between desperate, uncoordinated kisses, pulling him to her by the collar of his robe, groping for the knot in the sash, "quickly..."_

_Yes,_ he thinks again, kissing the vertebra at the base of her neck, all awkwardness falling away as the rhythms and motions return to him, and he wraps an arm around her torso to keep the long, hot line of her spine pressed against his chest when he rocks her up onto her hands and knees, needing to feel as much of her as possible as desire's own form of delirium takes hold, and he begins to ride into her, fast and deep.

Moira gasps, dropping her head until her brow skims the pillow. She braces a hand against the headboard to push her hips more forcefully back into his, and Siebren moans as the resistance drives him deeper within her, deep enough to feel the warm, blunt kiss of her cervix against the tip of his cock at the vertex of every thrust.

Other women, he distantly remembers, other women hated that -- he's not a small man in any regard, and has always had to be mindful of his size in every aspect of his life, and most especially in the bedroom, lest he hurt or overwhelm his partner without meaning to -- but Moira is better matched to his physicality than any other person he's ever been with, and not only in terms of height and build. She welcomes the whole of him, responds to it, begs him not to stop in a litany of frantic whimpers, " _There_ \-- right there, right there yes like that oh yes oh _God--_ "

She really does want all of him, gentle and rough alike, and it's as if there isn't a single part of her that was fashioned without one eye cast upon the eventuality of that truth, inside and out. She loves what he does to her, even what he can't help but do, and that knowledge alone sends a wave of pleasure tingling from his brain down the length his spine, where it meets and melds with the flood from the act itself, already on the verge of spilling over his ability to contain it.

When she comes, he's done for, the first hard throb of ecstasy hammering through him the second her hand leaves the headboard to clutch at the back of his thigh, stilling his movements as together they clench and quiver and gasp and shake, until he buckles with her to the mattress, the both of them panting and perspiring, speechless and spent.

At some point in the exhausted afterglow, his eyes drift shut on the sight of her satisfied smile, and he sleeps -- there is no telling precisely when. His sense of time remains tenuous at best, and though there now exists Day and Night beyond the dimming and brightening of artificial lights, it's been continually overcast and usually drizzling since they arrived, leaving few shadows with which to distinguish the passage of particular hours. "Soft days," Moira calls them, but it goes deeper than that, he feels -- there's a muffled, hidden quality to this place, the island like a stage shielded from both orchestra and audience by the heavy velvet curtains of its surrounding mists.

He dreams of horns and dissolution, of melting darkness and fields of quick and colorful lights scooped into the beak of a misconstructed nightbird wrought with claws for feathers, and feathers for claws.

He wakes to the feeling of fingernails grazing gently down the nape of his neck, and opens his eyes to a lamplit room and Moira's mismatched gaze, which for a second seems strangely rueful, until she blinks, and the emotion clears like fog beneath a noontime sun.

"Good evening," she greets him, her voice warmly amused.

"Evening?" he asks. So soon? "How late is it?"

"Half-eight. You slept the whole afternoon away."

Siebren groans softly and scrubs a hand over his face, and upon sitting up, sees that she's dressed in her usual leisure things and perched atop the bedclothes, having obviously been up and about for some time now, if not the entirety of the day.

"I sleep too much," he laments with a sigh.

"You don't," she contends, her hand moving to smooth back over his hair. "There is no standard timeline for recovery from the types of things you've been made to endure. It may take months for your stamina to fully rebuild itself."

"My stamina," he repeats, deadpan, and she smiles.

"Your mental stamina. This morning was wonderful. More than wonderful."

"Yes," he agrees, interlacing his fingers with hers. He doubts she would say any different even if he'd only managed the once, but it's reassuring to hear, all the same.

Indeed, it's the only thing he hears, he realizes -- the cacophony in his head is quiet, as if it has, at long last, reached a point of intermission, for although he can sense its instruments still furnishing his mind, they are, for the moment, unattended, and his thoughts, while hoarse from shouting to be heard above the din, are more accessible to him than they have been in what feels like forever.

He is awake -- not only conscious, but lucid, focused, _sane,_ as if being with her physically was the missing component essential for the reestablishment of his equilibrium. It makes him wonder, now, if his meltdown on the balcony ten years ago didn't have more to do with a subconscious reaction to her sudden absence than the cumulative effects of an overstimulating weekend.

"Are you hungry?" Moira asks, and he is -- ravenous, in fact -- but when she straightens and moves as if to leave the bed, he tightens his grip, and pulls her back to and on top of him, simply because he can -- simply because he didn't, once, and is resolved never to do so again.

"Siebren?"

"Photosynthesis," he explains, and his star smiles, understanding his meaning immediately.

"For you, perhaps, but what am I to eat? --Don't say it," she warns, pressing her forefinger to his lips before he can reply.

Staying obediently silent, he traps the slender digit between his teeth, and laps once at the pad.

Another brief shadow darts behind her eyes, but when she replaces her finger with her mouth, his curiosity evaporates as his thinly-banked desire for her flares and burns anew.

They eat closer to nine, when he finally permits her to move the single meter away from him required to transfer the tray on the bedside table to the mattress between them. On it are two mugs of tea, gone quite cold, a large plate holding a dense-looking, raisin-speckled loaf of bread, a ramekin of butter, and knives for slicing and spreading both.

"This was left on the stoop for 'Seabream,' " she explains with a roll of her eyes, "complements of Mrs. Reilly."

"Kind of her," he says, sawing off a thick slice from the loaf and topping it with a good amount of luxuriously yellow butter. "Considering."

"Bollocks," Moira scoffs, cutting a piece for herself. "Note the lack of the stew she promised me in particular. That's entirely intentional. Passive-aggressive old ninny. --Chew carefully, I wouldn't put it past her to have put a ring in it."

"A ring?"

"Old superstition. Find a coin, you'll be rich; a bit of rag, you'll be poor; a medallion, you'll be called to the church, and a ring…well. Aul Reilly's always been one to try to turn the road where she'd like to see it go, and she's wanted to see my road lead me to an altar for the last twenty years."

"I thought I alarmed her." Siebren frowns down at his half-eaten…what had the old woman called it? Barnbrick? "Do you suppose this is transactional?"

"What, like an offering left at the mouth of a cave to keep the dragon from raiding the village? No. She's old and nosy and likes to fuss. She's more curious about you than concerned about me, I assure you."

He nods and takes her at her word, content to believe he didn't make too poor of a first impression. This place is important to Moira, and he doesn't want its inhabitants to dislike him, unbothered though she herself may seem to be at odds with them. Truth be told, it pleases him to be included in something so simple as an old woman's wish for her…whatever Moira is to her -- a great-niece by proxy, he supposes -- to be happily partnered. It pleases him to be included in a stranger's definition of personhood.

There is indeed a ring -- a plain, adjustable brass band, not unlike his great-great-grandmother's wedding ring that his own mother had kept in a music box on her vanity -- that clatters onto the plate when he cuts his third slice from the loaf.

"Told you," says Moira, arching an eyebrow.

Siebren picks it up, and examines it curiously.

"It's very small," he notes.

"Yes. It's more symbolic than anything -- usually of an imminent need for the Heimlich maneuver or emergency dental surgery."

He rolls it between his fingers as he used to do a damaged locknut he'd kept as a souvenir from the shuttle that had taken him to the Moon, and while the weight is different, the motion is satisfyingly familiar.

He wonders what happened to it -- the locknut. He would have left it in his office at his lab in the Hague, in his desk drawer reserved for fidgets and salty licorice. Someone would have gone through his personal effects, no doubt -- Bremer, perhaps, or van Tassel. The inconsequential oddments of his life would have been boxed and divvied up amongst his friends and colleagues, or else given to Eleanora, in which case they'd likely been thrown away.

It occurs to him that his own wedding ring would have been in there, too. He'd always removed it at work -- or indeed, whenever he could expect to be away from home for any stretch of time -- not to signal his romantic or sexual availability, but because he's never found jewelry to be anything but an uncomfortable nuisance, forever snagging on clothing and trapping any dampness against his skin after he washes his hands. He should have taken that for a sign that he was never meant to be married at all, or at least that he was never meant to be married to someone prone to taking his sensory quirks as personal affronts, not that she'd been entirely unreasonable in doing so -- he'd never disclosed the extent of his neurodivergence to her, which, in retrospect, had been unfair to both of them.

He'd been young, and self-absorbed, and insecure; had imagined that as long as the façade of normality was present in his life in as many places as he could construct it, his mind might eventually adjust itself accordingly, and Nora had seemed an ideal partner for the purpose: average in all aspects, from her height to her academic standing, with no special interests, outstanding talents, or noteworthy ambitions. A pleasant, entirely ordinary young woman who, because she exceeded no societal expectations, he'd erroneously assumed would have similarly few personal expectations of him.

As it turned out, they'd both had very different ideas of how the other was supposed to function, and by the time he'd realized the futility of his endeavor, things were tense enough between them that he feared arming her with that knowledge. She'd wanted him home more, and with one call to the ESA, could have ensured he stayed there, consigned for the rest of his life to being a mere spectator to the application of his own theories, his own dreams.

Ironically, what had kept together long past their expiry date was the only thing they really had in common: a mutual tendency, bordering on compulsion, to avoid disruptions to their established routines. Their marriage degenerated quite naturally into a bad habit, and Siebren never did ask what had finally driven her to break it, for he'd met Moira that very night, and by the next morning his heart had been so deeply entrenched in his feelings for her that his wife's ultimatum failed to register as anything more than serendipitously timed.

Even now, he's known too much of genuine cruelty to consider his past actions -- or inactions -- more than unfortunately thoughtless, or in Nora's case, ignorantly misguided. They'd both mistaken fondness for love, resignation for acceptance, and it honestly gladdens him that she's found someone else -- he even hopes that the timing of her second marriage is indicative of why she chose to end her first, and that if she grieved him at all, she was able to do so with little in the way of resentment or guilt.

The barmbrack all but annihilated by his appetite, Siebren polishes off his mug of tea, then stretches out on his stomach with a heavy sigh.

"What's the matter, love?" Moira asks, shifting the remnants of their meal out of the way. "Don't let the ring concern you. I should be a half-rich, half-poor, polygamist nun at least a dozen times over by now, according to her divinatory choking hazards."

"No, I'm…I'm not, but..." He presses the ring's gap closed. "I am not anything. I am dead. Siebren de Kuiper is dead. Who am I to be, if not he?"

Moira shrugs. "A rose by any other name. You're still yourself."

"I feel like…like many people. And like nobody at all."

The ring leaves his fingers, but continues to turn gyroscopically in the air. Siebren inhales.

"Lie on me?" he requests.

She does, stretching out overtop him, slipping her hand into his, and he closes his eyes and focuses on the warm, naked weight of her: the soft crush of her breasts against his back, how her hips cradle his backside, and the tops of her thighs fit against his hamstrings.

He has her. He's exactly where he should be, able to exist in relation to the realest thing he knows.

The ring lands with a quiet thump on the pillow beside his head, and he relaxes.

"All right?" she asks, nuzzling the spot just below his left ear with her nose.

He chances his eyes, and nods. He's as pain free as he ever gets -- a dull but bearable background hum, tiresome but not torturous. Replete as he is in other ways, it hardly registers.

They rest like that for some time, idly matching the movements of their hands: pressing them together, rolling them back until only their fingertips touch, and then braiding them together again. Eventually, this develops into a small-scale wrestling match between their thumbs, and Siebren grins at the sound of her quiet laughter in his ear.

"I win," Moira declares, having pinned her opponent to her own index finger.

"I let you," he lies.

"Rubbish."

"You have an unfair advantage. You're armed with a little painted dagger."

"Natural selection, my darling. The more evolved one's defenses, the greater one's chances of survival, even in thumb wars."

"You're a sore winner, too," he complains.

"But a winner nonetheless."

Her lips brush his shoulder -- an acceptable consolation prize, he decides -- and he brings their hands to his mouth to kiss the finger that bested his.

"Siebren…" she says, after a pause.

"Hm?"

"Last night, in the water… How did you find me?"

His stomach drops for a second at the memory, his mind flashing on the awful bend of her breastbone beneath his frantic palms.

He holds his breath for a moment, just to feel the factuality of hers against his back.

"You, ah…you glow, for me, sometimes."

"Glow?"

"Mhm. Like sunlight through vellum."

"Only me?"

"That I know of, yes. Only you. I thought…I thought it was a, a beacon, of some kind -- a lighthouse I hadn't noticed, or… But it was you. You were...guttering, and I knew -- I knew that if I didn't get to you…"

She presses her warm cheek to the gooseflesh that rises on shoulder at the thought, and he feels her whole body tense as she tries to make herself heavier against him, more substantial.

"But you did," she says.

Thank God. He squeezes her hand. _Thank God._

"Was it different underwater?" she asks. "The music?"

Siebren sighs.

"No," he admits, and Moira runs her nails soothingly over his scalp.

"You're not crazy, Siebren."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because every other person on this planet who believes they can fly without mechanical assistance or enhancement _is,_ " she points out. "I don't deny that your experiences have had an effect on how you perceive and interact with reality, and yes, you exhibit many symptoms typical of complex trauma disorder -- but that doesn't make you crazy; it makes you human. And the fact of the matter is, there is no one in all of recorded history who has gone through what you have gone through after being exposed to any even remotely similar phenomena; no one else who has ever been able to do the things you're now capable of doing. It would be shamefully shortsighted to assume that whatever you're hearing is any less real than your more immediately observable abilities."

"They interest you, don't they? My…observable abilities."

"You interest me."

"Moira."

She sighs. "Yes, of course they do. If you were anyone else..."

Were _she_ anyone else, he might take the sentence as a threat, or at least a warning. But she's kept her word -- she's treated his symptoms as well as she can with only limited knowledge of what's causing them, and while she could have worked around him -- collected samples of his hair and saliva as he slept, or even from the cups and utensils he's used during meals -- he feels certain that she hasn't. Even if he didn't trust her so completely, surely she would have refined her behavior toward him in some way he might have noticed -- altered his medications, or asked leading questions -- if she had anything more to go on than what he can bear to divulge or be put through.

No, she's made it abundantly clear that his belonging to her in no way negates that he belongs first to himself, and that he has absolute ownership over every part of his body, be it still attached or left behind; if this is, as she implies, out of character for her, well...fate is often cruel, and prone to playing favorites. If he is one of hers, then there logically exist those who are not, or haven't been.

This should, he acknowledges, probably bother him immensely, and had he been born with a less parenthetical sense of empathy, his extreme isolation might have served to expand his ability to feel for others in an even more abstract, suppositious way -- but as it stands...simply, shamelessly, he cannot bring himself to care.

Her feelings are the ones that concern him, and he is -- was -- a scientist: he knows what it is to be given a glimpse of something extraordinary, only to have the whims of circumstance bind his eyes to its further exploration. On that level, at least, he knows that his reluctance must frustrate her, and he tells her as much.

Moira exhales against his ear. "I want to know, yes, but…I want you to know, too. If there is control to be had over your abilities, I want _you_ to have it, not--" Her mouth is close enough that he can hear the click of her teeth when she catches herself, and cuts the sentence short.

Siebren closes his eyes. He's been content not to ask. Asking, he senses, will cause things to gain momentum, and in a direction she's indicated he might not like. 

He doesn't want to move; doesn't want to take the first step toward leaving this place. It seems hideously unfair that they should be expected to -- that the world where it's wonderful spins to a close so much faster than the stagnant perdition from which he's so recently been freed.

But the universe thinks nothing of fairness; only of balance. He's an object in motion now, and if he is not to be acted upon, he must himself act. 

He must ask, as she asked:

"How did you find me?"

Moira tenses again, but differently, anxiously. She takes back her hand from his and braces it against his shoulder as she kneels up, and he turns beneath her onto his back so that she can seat herself on his thighs.

She rests her hands on his stomach, and he holds them again, as much to tether her there as for comfort.

For a number of moments, she simply looks at him -- at his face, at their hands, and, briefly, at his groin, perhaps toying with the idea that she might distract him instead. It would work, too -- would be so easy to lean again into that ceaseless yearning for her that now more than ever is a candle painting the wall behind his every thought with beckoning shadows. Perhaps she's tempted to distract herself in much the same way.

Even so, that she chooses not to is its own reassurance -- that she will not play games with him; that she respects his right to know, and his ability to comprehend.

"One of the organizations I work with," she begins, "has a talent for secrets, both keeping them and digging them up. It was during one of these digs that your existence was unearthed, and because of my own particular talents, I was selected to retrieve you."

"The bridge," he says.

"Yes. Among other things."

Siebren frowns. "You are some kind of… _spy,_ now?"

"Of a type. I'm still primarily a scientist -- Minister of Genetics at the scientific haven, Oasis. What led me to you is more of a…freelance endeavor."

"A minister." His eyebrows lift, genuinely impressed. "That's a few steps ahead of where you were dancing when we first met."

Moira herself looks oddly unenthused by her own advancement.

"Yes, well. It was an appointment much reproved by a broad swath of the scientific community."

"Why?"

"Because I replicated my results." She raises her right hand as if she's being sworn to something. "The proof is in the pudding, but I won't give them the recipe, not this time. Oasis respects that; for them, the proof was enough to offer me a position. They're more interested in innovation for its own sake than any potential application. They want to discover all that can be done, regardless of how or why or even _if_ anyone can find a use for it. It's almost…rococo, in a way. The pursuit of knowledge taken to its most obscenely ornamental extreme."

He releases her normal hand to take her altered one in both of his. He's had his suspicions -- or impressions, he might say, but neither word is adequate to the task of describing the things he feels he knows but can't -- the being able to touch or look at one thing and see all the other things that would be analogous to it in parallel scenarios both fantastical and commonplace, like hearing every possible octave of a single note being played at once, by every instrument imaginable.

"This," he says, "is not ornamental."

"No," she admits.

"It's a vault."

"Technically, my reactor's the vault. This is just the interface."

Siebren shakes his head. "That's the receptacle; this is the reliquary." He folds her livid fingers down, and sighs a breath through his nose. "How many people have you killed?"

Above him, Moira goes rigid. She tries to pull her hand away, but he doesn't let it go.

"I've killed four," he says. "They told me-- They told me I've killed four."

She's quiet as she scans his tone for temper, and he loosens his grip slightly against the possible impression that he might be trying to intimidate her into answering.

She starts to take her hand away again, but leaves it in his when he doesn't move to stop her a second time.

"Yes," she finally agrees.

"How many?" he asks again.

"…I don't know."

"Why?"

"Because I was never ordered to keep a tally."

"Ordered?"

"Yes, ordered. You've missed ten years, Siebren -- I told you, things have changed. The world has changed."

"Another Crisis?"

"No, not yet. But soon."

Memories of the first one -- a decade-long smear of anxiety and cigarettes split between his dissertation and postdoc fellowship, with long stretches of latently hostile silence broken by the wailing of sirens and thunderous rush of floodwaters. It had been Siebren's doctoral advisor, Igor Volsky, who'd brought him onboard the government-funded think tank to assist in the research and development of weaponizing the then-theoretical concept of Tobelstein fusion.

Study of the heavens has always gone hand-in-hand with war -- from the electional astrology used to schedule battles in ancient times, to the study of nuclear fallout confirming mankind's chemical descent from heavy elements originally fused in the cosmic forges of blue giants -- and it has always been easier to secure funding if a project can provide a military application: before the first telescope could be pointed at the stars, it had to prove its usefulness at sighting enemies in the distance.

Thus the goal twenty-five years ago had been to engineer a gravitic surge that could collapse a target on impact, with no other environmental side-effects -- a truly clean bomb, capable of being calibrated to implode a single omnic or an entire omnium, where even the debris it produced would be safely contained within its own blast radius.

The Crisis had ended before they could succeed, but the questions their work had posed had been far too intriguing for Siebren to view the project as anything less than a stepping stone toward something truly revolutionary, and his relentless pursuit of those answers came to define the rest of his life on a level he never could have anticipated.

This time, however, "I'm guessing it's not my talent for equations that piqued this organization's interest in acquiring me?"

"Not entirely," she confirms, "although your equations interest them as well."

"Who are they, Moira?"

She sighs, weary and slow. "It would be best to begin at the beginning…"

And so she does -- picking up, in fact, exactly where they'd left off a decade ago, starting with a taxi in front of the hotel.

She tells him about Blackwatch -- what it was, and what she did there. Key to both of these things is the commander who'd headhunted and trained her, and who'd protected her identity and shielded her from disciplinary action when the nature of her research was called into question by a jealous colleague. He'd even gone so far as to volunteer himself for experimentation after her work had been officially disavowed and denounced by their parent organization -- an ominous statement inconsistent with the nostalgic warmth in her voice when she says it, but that much, Siebren understands, being himself familiar with both feelings: he knows that more than the thrill of playing God, it's the gratitude at being believed in that she's remembering.

She tells him of her initial involvement with Talon -- how her enthusiasm for her work had devolved into a kind of mania during Blackwatch's last two years of operation, an obsessiveness that only worsened against a backdrop of increasing intracompany and political tension. Certain elements in Overwatch grew more intrusive and demanding of their covert counterpart's doings: funds were more closely scrutinized, and red tape and restrictions applied where few had been before. Feeling suffocated, resentful and desperate, she'd accepted assistance from the only hand that had offered any -- and besides, she'd rationalized then, what better way to undercut Talon's more wantonly destructive designs than by influencing their decisions from within? It's what she does, after all: modifies the base components of an organism to create a more perfect whole.

She tells him about Venice, and Switzerland, and the Petras Act. Here again, the commander features. She isn't without personal loyalty, and there's a genuine sense of comradery there. They'd both, she explains, been burned to keep their superiors warm -- literally, in his case, and the response of his twice-mutated genes to such extreme, extensive trauma was nothing short of nightmarish, both physically and psychologically.

Being the only person who knew how high the likelihood truly was that he'd survived the explosion, it had been she who'd sieved the rubble to find him, and, as there was no one with greater insight into his condition than herself, and only one organization in possession of the technology she needed to treat him -- only one organization that would as well have no qualms about allowing her to do so -- she had been left with only two logical choices: attempt any number of crude ways of putting him out of his misery while keeping her fingers crossed for one of them to finally work, or…

"Talon," Siebren says.

Moira's lain down again, and they face one another side by side. His right hand rests against the back of her neck, his fingers tracing nonsense shapes against her scalp that her left hand absentmindedly mirrors on the skin of his chest.

"Talon," she confirms.

"And did you heal him?"

"I tried. I'm still trying. I found a way to keep him relatively stable, with intermittent gene therapy treatments. Not quite the same thing, as he would be the first to point out."

"Is that why you've stayed? Because you feel you owe it to him to find a cure?"

Moira spends several seconds considering her answer.

"He was the only person who remained unfailingly in my corner for nearly three years, and we are both partly responsible for what the other has become," she says. "But, no. I haven't stayed only for him. 

"One doesn't simply leave Talon and resume a normal life. They dislike loose ends, and have a variety of means through which to see them tied off. If I left, my life would be forfeit, even if they failed to kill me. My work, my accomplishments…even my most humiliating failures will have all been for nothing. Having done the things I've done, knowing all that I know, there's not a country on Earth that would grant me asylum -- not without also wanting to exploit those things for their own political gain, and frankly, I've seen more than enough of how much integrity the quote-unquote _heroes_ of the world are willing to cede for the sake of appearances, let alone the upper hand in a conflict. I'd rather live with my back up against Talon's wall, in a position of my own choosing, than risk its being the recipient of yet another friendly knife while being compelled to walk a line I didn't draw."

"Honor among thieves?"

"No. No honor among anyone. No false declarations of it among thieves."

Siebren's quiet for a few moments, absorbing, metabolizing.

"So," he says, "the most notorious contributors to global unrest since Null Sector are responsible for my being here."

"For your escape from the facility, yes, but that you're here specifically was my decision."

"But they know you have me. Where we are."

"Yes."

He swallows. A painful tension begins to coil behind his eyes, as though a pair of tuning pegs have been embedded in his temples, to be twisted by the unseen hands of his own mounting agitation.

"Do they know why? That we…"

"They know we spent a night together. They don't know that it was...emotionally significant. There are two who suspect, but neither are inclined say anything to those who would believe it cause for concern."

"So right now, they think you are, what? Fucking me into submission?"

Moira winces. "To a degree."

"Elaborate, please."

"Officially, I am using our previous relationship to gain your trust and affection -- your loyalty -- as a means to achieving what your former captors could not, and finding a way to make your acquired talents...serviceable."

"And am I to have any say in the services I'm meant to render?"

"That remains to be seen. I told you, I'm doing my best, for both of us. I realize it's less than ideal, but I'm giving you as much of a choice as I can, for as long as I can."

She looks at him. Her fingers have gone very still.

"I'm not a good person, Siebren. I never have been. I'm no one's guardian angel, and this isn't what you deserve; I know that. I'm selfish. I want you. I tried not to; it didn't work. It's never worked."

He thinks back on all that she's told him, and finds the connection obvious, whether or not she does, between the timing of his accident and the advent of her downward spiral regarding to her research, and the lengths she'd gone to protect it when it was threatened.

He is so very angry -- not at her, but _for_ her. For himself. That their loop could have so twisted in the middle and trapped them both in reflective cycles of loss and exploitation, he stuck under a rock and she between another and a hard place, his total lack of choices echoed in her feeling forced to make increasingly poor ones.

"And here I'd assumed your 'other factors' were personal. A fiancé, somewhere, or a child, or…"

"No."

It's such a small, seemingly straightforward word, and yet what it contains is both reassuring and keenly painful.

_If there was ever going to be anyone, it would have been you._

"How long," he asks, "until Talon expects results?"

"Again, that remains to be seen. With at least one significant breakthrough, I could probably keep you here until the end of the year -- six more weeks, give or take. Following that, if it appears as though you're responding favorably to treatment, I should be able to arrange for your continuing proximity to me in Oasis."

"And if there is no breakthrough, or I don't respond favorably?"

"Then they start questioning the efficacy of my methods, and whether they ought to let someone else have a turn at you."

"Someone else?" A spike of cold, greasy fear oils its way up his gullet at the thought. "No -- no, that's not, that's… I-I don't want-- I can't, not without you I can't I--"

Moira hushes him, rubbing his sternum with the heel of her palm.

" _No,_ " he says again, grasping her hand, and shakes his head. "Moira, I don't want this, I have no wish to be passed around like a puppet from one master to the next!"

"You won't," she says firmly. "You won't be, not if we work together to prevent it. I will make things as easy on you as I can, my darling, but they _must_ be done. If you can come to govern your abilities, and moreover to recognize how you came to possess them, those are powerful bargaining chips in the case to be made for your greater independence. What you have to offer is also what you have to withhold."

"And if I don't have it? If this is all I can do, what then? Am I to go from living in a, a _fishbowl,_ to being penned like a bull and provoked into goring whatever cape Talon sees fit to wave in front of me?"

Moira's gaze is pained, but unflinching.

"That's a possibility, yes -- but I wouldn't have brought you here if I didn't believe your powers were controllable," she quickly amends. "I've reviewed the facility's data, and there's every indication that with the right approach--"

Her voice strobes into indecipherability as the pounding in his head intensifies, a searing pressure that slithers its way through every cranial cavity and capillary, every synapse and nerve. The faint auras and phosphenes that constantly shimmer across his field of vision begin to brighten and ripple and pulse; the grids warp, the grains shiver, and he shuts his eyes against the dizziness the distortions evoke.

After nearly a decade of being observed like a sideshow freak, watched by the flat glass eyes of cameras and toys, he has been freed with the caveat that he become one of them -- not a stuffed but a trained animal, a plaything to be wound up and set loose upon anyone unfortunate enough to be placed in his destructive path, and she not the precious, concealed seed of his survival, but the carrot dangled on a stick in front of him to ensure his cooperation.

_"The symmetry is, ah…fearful."_

Moira says something, but the words bend and twist through the unstable air, the syllables reaching his ears out of order, alternately muffled and sharp.

Time dilates, his sense of space contracts, and he feels it before he hears it -- a guttural dirge, immense and inevitable as the black apple he'd cupped between his hands, pitched so low as to thicken and scorch the very air into tar and the air, he realizes, the air is breathing _him,_ reeling his lungs up his throat and out of his mouth like twin fish hooked through their tails--

A weight hits his chest, and his body explodes and collapses at once as he's wrenched through a purling vortex of dark light -- not ultra, but hyperviolet. The roaring dirge cuts shrilly short; the bonds between his every atom stretch like taffy, weave together with those of another and then unravel just as quickly, snapping back into place as his body reforms with a hypnic jerk. His back hits something cold and unyielding, knocking his lungs back into his chest, and he gasps -- the weight there constricts around his ribcage and he shouts, thrashes, struggles to work himself free--

"Siebren, stop -- _stop!_ " Moira's voice, comprehensible again, commands, and the rolling, doubled blur of ivory and copper above him overlaps and reconciles into her intensely frowning face. The weight, he realizes, is her -- she's straddling him high on his waist, with her legs grapevining his thighs and her arms hooked under his shoulders like a harness, pinning him to the ground like an insect in a shadowbox.

"What-- What did you do?" he demands. " _What did you do?!_ "

"I faded," she tells him. "--Built a bridge. I built a bridge and I took you with me. You were having an episode, you couldn't--"

"No -- _no no no_ no it felt like-- It-- D-don't -- don't, don't let go -- _don't let go!_ "

"I won't," she promises, squeezing him tight as a vise. "I've got you. But love, listen to me, _it's okay--_ "

He shakes his head frantically. "It's not--"

" _It is._ We're only the back garden. Look: there's the house, just over there, do you see?" He does. "There's grass beneath you, soft and damp; can you feel it?" He can. "You can smell the lavender, yes? And the sea? Listen-- You can hear the waves crashing against the bluff, and the wind through the grass, and the--"

" _The stars!_ " he breathes.

Moira blinks, and cranes her neck to follow his wide and wild eyes past her shoulder and skyward, where the first clear night since they've been here domes the Earth, the bright spill of the Milky Way glittering above them like bioluminescent algae in the inky, infinite ocean of space.

And it's singing to him.

The music, as soft now as he is still, thins into the high, sweet agony of an adagio's desperate plea as the omnipresent bow of the universe saws across its every theoretical string in perfect unison -- fourteen billion years ago and however far into the future its boundaries continue to expand, all simultaneously.

It's not a continuum.

It's not a continuum, it's--

"An illusion," he whispers.

The passage of time is harmonized by its permanence. Two separate pieces of the same metal will weld to one another in a vacuum because there is nothing to deceive the atoms into behaving as though they are of two distinct entities -- but they don't _forget_ that they are meant to be such, they _remember_ that they never were -- that they never can be, and any appearance to the contrary, be it past or future, is nullified by the stasis of the constant now.

_In the silence, I am sound._

"Siebren…?"

Moira relaxes her hold and looks down at him, and when he turns his face to hers he sees, for a moment, his own eyes staring back at him, red and blue combining into violet-gray, and the vase of space between them seems to depict not two distinguishable figures in silhouette, but a single vessel suspended in a void of negative space.

She is the water-bearer; he is the fish.

"Mutable…" he murmurs to himself, "…fixed. It's all the same. Here and there, now and then, freedom and imprisonment: it's all an illusion!"

His gaze flicks back to the stars, and the moment of epiphany pops like a soap bubble, leaving a telltale film on the surface of his mind -- an iridescent ring of Was and Will Be, of bridges and transition themes.

"I think…" he says, the words feeling neither like someone else's nor his own, "I think I know what happened. Aboard the space station. I think I know what happened to me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Siebren is a Moira apologist uwu
> 
> I'm going to take a moment to gloat at having called his swimming spray. My victories may be small and meaningless, but they're mine. (￣ω￣)旦 Really liking his Flying Dutchman skin beside Moira's Banshee, too, very pleasing intersection of Davy Jones and David Jones there. (In case it hasn't been made obvious, by and large I ship things according to their potential number of complementary puns.)
> 
> Also, some slight interaction bait wedded to genuine curiosity: which Sigma skin would you prefer get an AU first, Asylum or Maestro? Both historical (c° 1800s, the latter at the beginning of the century and the former nearer the end) and served with cross-dressing Moiras. (In the Asylum one, she would also have an eye patch, if that makes a difference -- it would me, ngl.)
> 
> Title by VØID. Fairly unknown, but very Sigma lyrics. "It's there where you'll find me / Strangled by my melody," and "If every reaction is equal and opposite / How has my head not killed me yet?" I mean, honestly.
> 
> Thank you for reading! Happy almost Halloween, and please contribute Vibes that I can get the next part finished before bloody Christmas.


	7. Homogenic

_Einstein's E = mc² is an extraordinary concept. So radical: matter and energy are two phases of the same sort of general stuff. There's only one other idea that radical: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us._

\--Kurt Vonnegut

* * *

He doesn't speak after that. He hardly moves except to breathe and blink, his gaze riveted to the spangled sky above them and whatever mosaic is at long last taking form from the fractured pieces of his mind.

At least he's calm, although he continues to hold onto her with forgotten tension. Moira welcomes it, burrowing against the heat of his body until the chilly burn of the cold night air makes her toes go numb and her ankles start to ache.

"Siebren, we can't stay out here," she says, hoping she won't need to fade them back to the house, wanting to avoid frightening him again, if she can help it. "Let's keep the threat of hypothermia down to once per week, hm?"

He looks at her uncomprehendingly, but doesn't resist when she moves to sit them both up, and then pulls him to his feet. Moira leads him by the hand to the kitchen door, and he gives the stars only one last, lingering glance before following her inside.

She takes him into the sitting room and lights the fireplace before urging him down to the rug in front of it. Siebren sits with ankles crossed and knees tucked to his chest as she fetches the sealskin from the sofa, and she arranges herself behind him, bracketing his thighs with her own, wrapping the blanket around both their shoulders and giving him the ends to hold so she can rest with arms folded against the warm expanse of his back. His skin smells like sea salt and the sweet-sharp, cedary scent of crushed grass.

"Okay?" she asks, and he wordlessly hooks an arm around her leg and hugs it to his side.

The proactive gesture melts a little of her unease, reassuring her that while his attention may be elsewhere, it's not in a place inaccessible to her.

"Okay," she murmurs, pressing a kiss between his shoulder blades before resting her head there, resigning herself to his silence -- there's certainly plenty of meat on the bones of her own thoughts to be gnawed on in the meanwhile.

That he can indeed fade with her, for one.

_"I'll put you in my cup, you can tell me where you need to go, and I'll take you there."_

There is, to the best of her current understanding, a threshold of complexity that disallows the fade phenomenon in the majority of multicellular organisms. Inanimate or artificial objects are simple -- even omnics, for all their sentience, are comparatively static creatures whose forms and functions scarcely scrape the surface of the mechanical intricacies inherent to organic life. Their processing power is extraordinary, but their components are as finite as those of a wristwatch, and what is in them that is capable of replication has more in common with the rigid, crystalline formations of minerals than it does the tractile, metamorphous nature of domain Eukaryota.

Counterintuitively, the ways in which a body changes as it moves through time -- its continuous cycles of cellular decay and generation -- are what make it incompatible to movements of time around it, much like the gills of a shark are dependent upon forward propulsion to properly function. It's the intrinsically kinetic nature of biological life that adheres it to a single temporal track: there are simply too many moving parts to ensure a cohesive shift without first engineering a level of elasticity within both the parts themselves and the bonds between them.

In Moira's work, this is achieved via the stable transfection of BG44, a cocktail of genetic factors modeled after a handful of mRNA sequences found in marine sponges and a certain species of jellyfish. Run a living sponge through a sieve, and its separated cells will recognize one another, attract and reform; when threatened with its own demise, the biologically immortal jellyfish _Turritopsis dohrnii_ may revert from medusa to polyp, effectively restarting its life cycle.

In effect, during every fade or shadow-step, she and Gabriel are "sifted" forward through space but backward through time, with the physical stresses of that paradox mitigated by an artificial pluripotency that renders their cells as flexible as those of an embryo, capable of assuming various functions as developmentally required, and essentially negating the erasure of their existence by way of their perpetually potential nature: they _could_ be, therefore they _are._

_"I am the fish. My tails are chained. I swim in two different directions, and go nowhere; I swim in circles and go nowhere."_

It doesn't surprise her that Siebren's body's adherence to spacetime is as negotiable as its relationship to gravity: the two are, after all, inextricably linked. The ways in which he appears older than he did ten years ago are mostly cosmetic, having more to do with the strain of his captivity than they do any real physical decline, if the accuracy of the German facility's most recent bone scans and blood work are to be believed. Just as he was in the aftermath of his original injuries, he is, on paper, uncannily healthy, as hale and hearty as a man half his age -- not unlike Moira herself, really.

_"It's all the same…"_

She closes her eyes.

Is it?

Are they?

All around them seems to glimmer a palpitant sense of inevitability, weak but essential, like a thready pulse, that she can neither confidently deny nor comfortably accept. It somehow feels as though time simply decided not to apply to them even when it ought to have done, on the almost whimsical basis that it eventually wouldn't -- that the potential of their connection was all that was necessary to effect its finality, like Athena sprung, fully-grown and fully-armed, from the head of Zeus. _Cogito, ergo sum._

But then, should it matter that the time they've actually spent together amasses to two short weeks, when it's now a part of their very physicality to slip between the moments and meters to which their bodies were originally prescribed, however trifling those passages on a cosmogonic scale? What does "now" even mean to those able to exempt themselves from the linearity of human perception, and would that exemption be, by its very definition, both retrospectively and prospectively applied?

She wonders what Cadet Oxton is up to these days... Gabriel, she thinks, would know -- and would no doubt immediately deduce the reason for her sudden interest, or something near enough to it, as their conversation earlier that afternoon had made irritatingly clear. Moira had known, when she'd seen his missed call on her phone, that he would have something to say about her recent actions and current location, and she'd interpreted his having taken this long to do so as, if not necessarily a good sign, then at least almost definitely not a bad one.

She'd presumed the call would be standard reconnaissance -- if he'd waited, then he either wasn't too alarmed by what those actions meant, or he didn't want to appear so to any who might be trying to monitor his contacts. The lack of urgency suggested that his stance was undecided -- curious, perhaps even suspicious, but persuadable.

What she'd failed to consider -- what she'd known, but allowed herself to forget -- was just how damned good Gabriel Reyes was at what he did; what he used to do. Blackwatch had been founded at the at the crossroads of plausible deniability and necessary evil -- principles exemplified by its assets and agents, and most especially by the man who'd been chosen to acquire and lead them -- and while he hadn't exactly seen through her from the first, he'd always known how to forensically find and follow the hairline cracks in a pane of glass back to their point of impact…

_She tapped the button to switch the call from flat to holo as soon as they'd said hello, and Gabriel's face -- or the rapacious mask that, these days, sufficed as such -- jumped from her phone screen to form in three dimensions of pale blue light, like a sculptured bust, over the kitchen bar._

_"How's the Island of Doctor Moireau?" he grumbled -- there really was no other word for it, between the loose crunch of his deformed vocal cords and perpetually misanthropic mien._

_Moira sighed. "Must you always call it that?"_

_"Yes," he said simply. "I'm old and set in my ways."_

_"The only part of you that is set."_

_"Ha, ha. Well?"_

_The display rotated to follow her as she retrieved an apple from a bowl on the worktop and a paring knife from the magnetic strip on the wall. She gave him a noncommittal shrug. "It's fine."_

_" 'Fine?' "_

_"Yes, Echo." She plunked herself down on a barstool and set about quartering and coring the fruit, slicing a bruise from its flesh. "Fine."_

_"Care to expand on that?"_

_"Not really, no. Akande has my reports, and surely Sombra does as well; ask one of them."_

_"I did. Akande said you went off-book. Something about making use of a prior connection."_

_"And? You know perfectly well what connection he's referring to. You were practically in the room with us, as I recall."_

_"The one next door," he clarified. "I was planning on making contact that night. If Doctor Manhattan over there had stepped out of the elevator thirty seconds later, that knock on your door would have been mine."_

_"Hm. Lucky me, then."_

_"Are you sure about that?"_

_"Come now, Gabriel, even you can count to ten."_

_She could imagine the face he was pulling behind the mask, and smirked as she bit into a segment of apple, enjoying the crisp snap of the skin between her teeth._

_"What about six?" he growled._

_Moira politely shielded her mouth with one hand. "Which six?"_

_"The six months you spent inside a bottle after he died. …Yeah," he said, when she paused mid-chew, "I knew about that. Biotics may have fixed your hangovers before morning simulations, but you still smelled like a fucking distillery when you worked up a sweat. Come on, O'Deorain, you didn't really think McCree wanted to spend his last night in Tortuga babysitting you in that bar, did you? I knew what day it was. I ordered him to make sure you didn't do anything stupid."_

_"You thought I might harm myself? Over a man? Over **anyone**?" She was almost too stunned by the presumption to afford it the full measure of warranted disgust._

_"Not deliberately," said Gabriel. "But you can be impulsive. You might've picked the wrong fight, tried to go for a swim, passed out on your back..."_

_Moira's mind flashed back on yesterday's impromptu cliff dive into an ocean two degrees above freezing, and she pretended that the sudden heat creeping its way up her face was caused by anger._

_"Unbelievable," she huffed. "Not to mention erroneous. The date was coincidental; I had more and better reasons to drink than the unfortunate passing of a one night stand, I assure you."_

_"Oh, yeah? Like what?"_

_"I had an intrusive shitheel of a commander, for one."_

_Gabriel snorted. "You know, when I saw how his death affected you, it...concerned me. I thought I might have read you wrong. From your profile, you hadn't seemed the type."_

_"The type to what? Be capable of the full range of human emotion?" She'd heard that one before._

_"No, I know you're human. You're very human. Just not usually about **other** humans. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Something sparks your interest, and--" He snapped his fingers. "Off you go. It just hadn't happened with a person before. And once I realized that, _ _I was relieved that he'd died."_

_Moira's jaw tightened, and she focused on the half-eaten apple wedge browning between her fingers -- phenolic compounds oxidizing into o-quinones, reacting with amino acids to produce melanins._

_"One_ _of the reasons I recruited you was your lack of any serious personal ties," Gabriel continued. "No one at home making demands of your time and attention. No exploitable liabilities."_

_Moira looked up._

_"No one who would miss me enough to demand answers in the event I succumbed to an occupational hazard," she added, setting the apple aside._

_"A bonus, but not my chief concern."_

_"Bollocks. You've always preferred to mine your diamonds from rock bottom. Shimada's mutilation, McCree's arrest, my professional blacklisting…like a possessive lover, it best serves your interests when the person you covet feels as though they have no one to turn to but you."_

_"Interesting choice of analogy."_

_"Eat glass, Gabriel."_

_"Why, would it kill me? Or would it just fuck up my voice?"_

_"Touché."_

_"So, is that why you've isolated de Kuiper? To ensure his dependence on you?"_

_"Don't be stupid. You know very well what prolonged solitary confinement can do to a person -- the paranoia, the anxiety -- and his powers manifest in accordance with his distress. I trust you've seen the hospital footage?"_

_"I have."_

_"Then you know how unwise it would be to overwhelm him with too much, too quickly. I'm a familiar face, attached to positive associations; if you can think of a better inroad into winning his trust and cooperation, I'm all ears."_

_"What about Widowmaker?"_

_"Is that suggestion intended to insult me, him, or her?"_

_"I'm not talking about Amélie. I'm talking about what you did to her."_

_"The procedure itself?" Moira raised an eyebrow, pretended to consider it, shook her head. "No. Amélie LaCroix was a singularly ideal candidate for Widowmaker's implementation -- young, impressionable, her thought patterns already primed by twenty years of dance to accept and assimilate repetition. The physiological elements of the procedure enhanced those attributes, but it didn't create them whole-cloth. You won't get the same results from a mind that spent twice as long in a discipline that demanded it question and requestion whether the information placed in front of it held true across multiple axes of reality."_

_Gabriel made an concessive noise in the back of his throat, and then asked, "Is that why you never went through with it? --On yourself, I mean."_

_In the tennis match of their conversation, the question landed as near to the net as Moira was to the service line, and her brain did a double-take._

_"Sorry?"_

_"The Widowmaker procedure was what you traded the whiskey for, wasn't it? Anesthetics for amputation?" he asked._

_"I'm afraid I don't follow."_

_"Bullshit, you don't follow. You're good -- you're the best -- but even you couldn't pull off a genetic overhaul **that** involved in the handful of weeks between your addition to Talon's payroll and Amélie's kidnapping, not in the middle of the fallout from Venice. The depositions, the audits, Ziegler breathing down your neck…" He shook his head. "There's no way, unless all you had to do was fine-tune a ready-made procedure -- one you'd been stitching together on your own time and tech for, what, nearly two years at that point? Because you hadn't made it for her: you'd made it for you."_

_Moira was quiet for a moment, and then_ _rested her elbows on the bar to regard Gabriel over folded fingers, her eyes narrow._

_"Strange," she said._

_"What's that?"_

_"Theoretically, your condition should protect you from age-related cognitive decline -- unless your brain has somehow managed to wraith its way out of your ears?"_

_He didn't dignify the deflection with a response._

_"When you sobered up, I stopped paying attention," he continued. "I shouldn't have. You're like me: you don't weather a storm until it passes, you just learn how to live in its eye."_

_Her first instinct was to double down -- to scoff, ridicule, deny -- but the distinct lack of smugness in the cynical rasp of his voice gave her pause. There was accusation there, yes, but also defeat. Regret._

_Guilt._

_Her lip curled in revulsion. "Are you… **apologizing** to me?"_

_Granted, she'd been somewhat surprised, years ago, at how quietly Gabriel had accepted LaCroix's modifications, her exact role in her husband's death, and Moira's involvement in both. She hadn't probed his reaction too deeply at the time, having chalked it up to a combination of shock and disillusionment fatigue. That she'd come back for him following his fight with Morrison, and was the only person who knew how to stand between him and the maddening, mind-melting levels of pain his condition now entailed had probably earned her a certain level of clemency, as well._

_She didn't care for this new, third option: that every time he looked at LaCroix and her frozen heart, he saw Moira's broken one. It was an acutely violating thought, even moreso than his intimate knowledge of the encounter that had led to it, and his conceited assumption that there was anything he could have done to make it better only made it that much worse._

_"And here I thought you'd been smart enough to consign your martyr complex to the rubble in Switzerland," she said darkly._

_"Grief has a streamlining effect on some people," Gabriel explained. "They hit their best strides when they're at their worst, and you were one of them. You were more decisive, more ruthless, more **creative** \-- both in and out of the field. So I let it happen. I turned a blind eye and I let it eat away at you and I told myself it was for the good of the team."_

_"Oh, spare me," she spat. "You don't get to assume responsibility for my actions, least of all because you failed to mandate a few counseling sessions that you know very well I wouldn't have cooperated with regardless. For Christ's sake, I was forty years old; I knew what I was doing."_

_"You were **Blackwatch** ," he insisted. "You were one of mine, **my** responsibility, no matter your age, no matter your role -- that's not something I punched in and out of according to office hours."_

_"God... Fine, yes, you're entirely to blame. You are the absolute worst person to ever exist, and Gerard LaCroix died at the hands of his bloodthirsty blueberry of a wife because **I** needed a hug, but **you** preferred what I could do for you without one. There: is that a snugger fit for your self-flagellating narrative?"_

_An exasperated sigh finally rattled its way up his scarred larynx._

_"You're such a bitch."_

_"Indeed. Would you like to take credit for that, too?"_

_"It's not about credit, O'Deorain."_

_"Then what **is** it about, Reyes? What do you want? My forgiveness? My remorse? Neither would be sincere. Talon would have seen LaCroix turn the knife on herself after she'd done for her husband, did you know that?"_

_"You view Widowmaker as an act of altruism?"_

_"Hardly. One of frugality, perhaps."_

_"Of course. You're not the angel of death; you're just the fate worse than."_

_The barb stung more than it would have done even a few short days ago._

_"Whether I saved her or damned her is irrelevant," Moira pressed on. "The point remains, she's more alive than she is dead because I intervened, and she was marked for death in the first place because of whom she chose to marry. You attended their wedding, did you not? Do you also wish you hadn't held your peace during the ceremony, when you knew perfectly well Gerard had a target on his back that could be transferred to hers? She was what, twenty-two, twenty-three? Affluent, sheltered. Did you really believe she was entering into that arrangement fully aware of the consequences it was likely to incur?"_

_"And de Kuiper?" he asked._

_"What about him?"_

_"Is he fully aware of the consequences your 'arrangement' is likely to incur?"_

_"Don't," Moira bristled._

_"Don't what?"_

_"You know what. This isn't that, but it's not what you're implying, either."_

_"No? So he's capable of giving his informed consent to...whatever it is you're doing over there? What was it, 'counting to ten?' "_

_"He's quite capable of making his own decisions, yes."_

_"Right. Because that's the same thing."_

_She scowled. "Take off your mask."_

_"Why?"_

_"I want confirmation there's not some sanctimonious blonde hiding beneath it."_

_"Very funny."_

_"No, it's not. He's not some drooling incompetent, Gabriel, and that you believe he would hold any sort of appeal to me if he were is--"_

_"It's not about what I believe," he said sharply, "it's about what they **expect**."_

_Moira opened her mouth, and probably would have kept arguing, had her time with Siebren not attuned her mind to listen for the meaningful undertone that hummed parallel to the fundamental pitch; instead, she fell silent, rewound the conversation, played it again. Only then did she realize why he'd called -- what this was, with its jabs and evasions, praises and taunts._

_The bastard was putting her through a training exercise._

_Gabriel watched her get it, the satisfaction all but wraithing off of him, and she wished he would actually feel it if she were to slap his projection across the face._

_"Never punched out," he reiterated, shrugging. "Good thing, too, because if you get that defensive the first time Akande insults him -- and he will -- whatever it is you're planning is gonna get a hell of a lot harder to pull off."_

_"I'm not planning anything."_

_"Yeah. Neither am I. But just so you're aware, I don't intend on being left out of the loop this time around."_

_She contained her flinch at his choice of words to a fractional tilt of her head._

_"Well, I'd promise not to contribute to the death of another of your friends, but you no longer have any of those, so."_

_His gaze was level behind the black eye sockets of his mask. "I still have one."_

_Moira sneered, although she couldn't bring herself to disagree. Theirs was a complicated friendship, but a friendship nevertheless: a battle-tested rapport built on a level but sandy sense of mutual respect and understanding, with the trust between them too loose to support anything more substantial than a temporary shelter, but likewise ill-suited to the construction of grudges, however richly deserved._

_"Always with a touch of the dramatic," she chided._

_"Pot, kettle. Be careful, O'Deorain. Don't let the hearts in your eyes keep you from seeing the bigger picture."_

_"Aye, Commander." Moira rolled the eyes in question, but that she knew Gabriel spoke from personal experience prevented the warning from sounding too infuriatingly paternalistic. "And, Reyes..."_

_"What?"_

_She steeled herself. "If I'd thought you could have helped, I would have…" No, that was a lie. She tried again, "You did what you could for me in the only way that might have made a difference. That it wasn't enough wasn't your fault, or your choice, and I never thought it was. I wouldn't have gone back for you if I'd ever felt you hadn't shown up for me."_

_He was silent for a moment, and she hoped that meant it was as uncomfortable for him to hear as it had been for her to say._

_"Understood," he said gruffly, and then, to parry the awkwardness, "One more thing."_

_"What?"_

_"Cocteau Twins or Siouxsie and the Banshees?"_

_Moira glowered._

_"Fucking Sombra..." she muttered, vowing to poison the prying hacker's next baker's dozen of bribes. "Cocteau Twins. The Cure or the Damned?"_

_"The Cure, but Dave Vanian over Robert Smith."_

_Her lips pursed in a doubtful moue. "...I'll allow it. Goodbye, Gabriel. I'll see you in Venice."_

_"The conchas were good, by the way--"_

_His face collapsed as she ended the call, the hard light pixels scattering in bright grains across the bar before degrading into the ambient light of the room._

The audacity of that man. The sentimentality. The _cheek._

Still, it's a small weight lifted off her mind to know that his position on the matter is, at present, neutral enough, unpleasant though it is to know he'll be watching her and Siebren both, connecting the dots between small gestures and surreptitious glances, drawing conclusions that make Moira's skin crawl to think about.

But even that, she supposes, may be a warning in itself, that equally attentive but less benign eyes will also be upon them, critiquing their performances as manipulator and marionette. They'll need to be prepared for that, Siebren especially. Formal boundaries will need to be outlined, limitations practiced, his self-soothing techniques reinforced...

In direct opposition to the thought, Moira unfolds her arms to circle them tightly around his torso, pressing her cheek and chest against his back, and Siebren leans automatically into the embrace, breathes into it, squeezing her thigh against his ribs.

The exchange feels so natural, she doesn't even notice its occurrence, not even when he turns his head to ask, "Okay?"

Moira nods mutely against his back, and focuses on the hypnotic tattoo of his heart in her ear, on the words she imagines caption the sound of its beating: _With-you, With-you, With-you..._

"Okay," he says softly, sliding his fingers up and down her shin.

* * *

When she next opens her eyes, it's morning, and while she's still curled up in the sealskin, she's no longer in the sitting room at all, but upstairs, in bed, alone.

Well, nearly alone -- Dolly's been tucked up beneath one of her arms, and upon sitting up and catching sight of herself in the foxed mirror above the dresser facing the foot of the bed, Moira nearly completes the immature picture by reflexively reaching for her glasses on the bedside table -- glasses she hasn't worn daily since she requested contact lenses at age fourteen, and hardly at all since having her left eye surgically corrected at twenty-three.

Shaking off the momentary deja-vu and thumbing the sand from her eyes, she calls for Siebren, but her voice is always weak upon waking, and it doesn't carry far.

The answering silence makes her nervous regardless, and she sets Dolly aside on the pillow, hastily pulls on last night's discarded clothing, and starts immediately for the stairs.

Rationally, she doesn't think he would leave. No matter how disturbed he may be by what he learned last night -- about her or about himself -- he wouldn't be so insensible as to flee without resources or a means of avoiding detection. He wouldn't knowingly endanger other people with the unpredictability of his powers, or risk his own recapture.

Still, it's not relief she feels, but alarm, when she rounds the landing to obvious evidence of his continuing presence in the house: dozens of floating papers crowd the narrow corridor of the lower half of the staircase, as well as what she can see of the hallway beyond it -- by a considerable margin, the most widespread gravitational disturbance she's known him to be able to produce thus far.

One of the papers drifts near enough to grab, and Moira crouches to snatch it out of the air just beyond her feet.

It's from the printer in her little-used office-slash-dining room, white and unlined, and she finds it crammed from edge to edge with equations in a sharp but slapdash masculine hand, half in red ink and, after the pen obviously ran dry, half in blue. Her knowledge of quantum field theory is patchy, circumscribed to specific concepts she's found helpful in refining her own research, and so while she recognizes the notations, what they're intended to convey in this instance is, as Reyes would put it, above her pay grade.

Moira wets her lips.

She takes a breath, takes hold of the handrail, and steps down into the field.

It's surreal, the floating -- like dream physics, where the ability to fly is there but control over it isn't, and one can neither touch the ground nor summon any appreciable lift through sheer will alone.

She pulls herself down the staircase, collecting papers as she goes. Some resemble the first, densely packed with mathematical minutiae; others are blank except for an indecipherable diagram or graph disrupted by oddly mundane doodles of human eyes.

One page depicts only a single symbol, practically carved into the paper with heavy, violent, overlapping strokes: **_∑_**

She swallows against the sudden dryness of her mouth.

Something that makes itself quite clear as she negotiates the hallway: the entire downstairs is going to be an absolute _wreck_ when he switches off. Books and furniture bob about like shipwreck flotsam, the larger pieces confined to their rooms of origin, but nothing anywhere near its designated place.

Leery of being caught under anything weightier than a throw pillow, should a sudden change of mood precipitate a shift in the gravitational field, Moira hugs the walls as much as she can, clearing her path top and bottom as she picks her way through the house, keeping her body parallel to the floor so as not to break her neck in the event that everything falls up against the ceiling.

Siebren's not in the kitchen, nor in the room the paper came from, and a glance at its keypad tells her that her lab remains locked and hermetically sealed.

The sofa bars the doorway to the sitting room -- not intentionally, she doesn't think, as it takes only a push of her fingertips to send it drifting toward the fireplace--

_The fireplace._

Moira pulls herself hurriedly into the room, and exhales in relief to see that he at least had the wherewithal to shut off the flames before he filled the ground floor of the house with airborne kindling. Small favors.

Siebren himself she locates sat against the ceiling, cross-legged in joggers but no shirt, with his back to the plaster and last night's serving tray desked across his lap. He's scrawling on a depleted stack of paper, brow furrowed and lips moving mutely as he writes, the skin of his hands stained with multiple colors of ink. He doesn't appear to have clocked her entrance.

"Siebren?" she asks.

He ignores her, if he hears her at all, and Moira pushes off from the wall to float to him, steadying herself with her free hand on the ceiling about a meter to his right.

"It's Pythagorean," he mumbles. "Virtue and vice; knowledge and life. Two branches, one trunk, and the indeces like shoulder crickets, like...like snow bees…"

"Siebren," she says again, louder and more firmly.

His mouth twists in irritation, and he tosses his head as though a fly has just buzzed too close to his face.

"Silver," he hisses, "silver side… _Fata Turchina;_ yes, that's fair. You eat the food and you have to stay. Sublingual -- Eucharistic, but inverted -- _horned._ Bread and bones…guts and toes…"

He pauses, calculates something in his head, and then quickly scrawls the next part of what looks to be some kind of metric tensor.

Moira looks down at the papers in her hand, at the lone glyph glaring up at her from the topmost page.

"…Sig--" 

His hand snaps shut around her wrist before she can even complete the word, yanking her under him and pulling her close, their noses nearly brushing as his bloodshot eyes bore into hers. His right pupil is blown wide, and the left one's less than half its size.

" _It's awake,_ " he whispers, his voice urgent, conspiratorial. " _It's alive._ "

It's the only thing he's given leave to say before a convulsive gasp, like the beginnings of a yawn, shudders through him. His spine arcs, his neck cords, his uneven eyes roll back in his head -- and the world falls down.

The papers, the sofa and coffee table, felt-tips, books, picture frames, lamps: all of it flutters, crashes, thumps to the floor at once -- in this room and, from the sound of things, every other one. Moira grabs for Siebren as they drop like twin sacks of potatoes, protectively tucking her chin and his head both against her chest and trying not to further tense against the collision she knows is coming.

Luckily, there's nothing but the rugged floor itself beneath her when she hits, and that she knew to expect the diaphragm spasm that temporarily halts her lung function means it doesn't shock her as much as it could have done; still, it fucking _hurts,_ and it's the work of nearly a minute's shallow, mindful breathing until she can adequately focus on anything else, in no way helped by the hundred kilos of unconscious Dutchman sprawled atop her.

She flexes her feet and toes to be sure that having the wind knocked out of her is the only of her injuries, and then feels over Siebren's head and spine and arms for anything obviously broken or out of place. Thin as she is, she apparently makes a decent enough cushion for a three-meter drop -- he's suffered no conspicuous physical damage, his breathing is steady, and his pulse is strong.

With some effort, Moira hefts him over onto his back, and her heart skips a beat at the blood covering the lower half of his face and her shirt where she'd held him. There's no swelling that she can feel, no evidence of fractures… Not an impact injury, then, but a side-effect of…whatever that was. A dissociative state? A seizure of some kind?

Either way, the sooner he wakes, the better. There's ammonium carbonate in the downstairs bathroom medicine cabinet, and she's just scrambled up to go and get it when his strangled groan brings her back down to the floor.

"Siebren--"

She kneels beside him and slips an arm beneath his shoulders, and he flinches, hard, as if kicked in the ribs by an invisible boot, and twists onto his side a split-second before he vomits a burning, nothing mix of stomach acid and partially curdled tea all over himself and the rug.

Moira helps to maneuver him up onto his forearms and knees between heaves, until all that remains is a pink thread of saliva tinged with blood that trails from his mouth to the rug as he struggles to catch his breath, his eyes screwed shut and fingers gnarling against his temple and in the fabric of her trousers.

" _Pijn,_ " he chokes out, his voice raw and breathless, pleading, " _n-negen…_ "

"Okay," she says, "I'll be right back."

" _Nee, niet doen--_ "

"Two seconds. I promise."

She fades before he can protest again, vanishing from his grasp and directly up to the bedroom to grab her reactor, tugging on its left gauntlet before returning to where he's turtled prone over his knees, rocking back and forth with his head in his hands.

She directs the healing beam against the back of his neck, and he shudders as the biotics get to work, sinking through his skin and into his bloodstream, riding the current of his breath into his lungs and sinuses and brain, and when he reaches for her again, she folds herself over his clammy back and rocks with him until he calms, whispering reassurances that it's okay, it's over, she's got him, he's safe.

"Let me see your eyes, love," she says, pulling him up to face her.

They're still red-rimmed and watery, but the pupillary anisocoria is a good deal less than it was -- perhaps a millimeter of difference, now, between the two, and they're equally responsive to changes in light levels as she shades each one in turn.

"Good. Your name?"

"Si… Siebren." He doesn't sound convinced, or maybe he's just just surprised by the question.

"Do you know where you are?"

"With you."

Moira smiles slightly, and specifies, "And where are we, you and I? Right now, physically?"

"You and I..." he echoes, his eyes momentarily losing focus before he returns to himself with a few rapid blinks. "S-secret. It's a secret."

Close enough.

" _Stertje,_ you're bleeding."

Moira follows his worried gaze down to her shirt.

"It's yours, love," she assures him, peeling it off both to prove she's unharmed and, as it's already soiled, to mop the worst of the mess from his face at chest. "See?"

Siebren sniffs, and runs the back of his thumb over the blood beginning to crust beneath his nose, frowning.

"Do you remember what happened?" she asks.

He looks around the room, at the chaos he's caused -- everything upset, upside-down, out of place.

"No, not that," Moira says quickly, redirecting his attention to her face, her hands framing his eyes like winkers. "Don't worry about that; we'll clean it up. Do you remember, Siebren, what you were doing before? What you said? What you were working on?"

"Working…?" He blinks, and she can practically see the lightbulb sputter back to life above his head. "Yes! Yes, the workings--"

Ignited with sudden purpose, he knee-walks over to the nearest scattering of papers and begins haphazardly pooling them into a pile.

"The skin's been eaten off!" he exclaims. "I-I swallowed a clock and its teeth bit mine -- three rows, like a shark: milk and meat and marrow, and the loops, the loops _fold,_ like jaws, the the the keys double infinity! That's where I got it wrong before -- it's not determinism, o-or even reversibility, but reflection, reproduction, reduplication -- re _capit_ ulation! It _hinges,_ it--"

His hands are shaking worse than usual, and he strews as many pages as he manages to shuffle together, until Moira moves to take his hands in hers and presses her thumbs to the centers of his palms, leery of his excitement triggering another episode in the brittle wake of one so severe.

"Easy, now," she cautions. "One thing at a time, yes?"

Siebren shakes his head, but makes an effort to still himself, taking a deep breath and braiding their fingers together so tightly she can feel his heartbeat racing beneath his skin.

"That's just it," he says. "It's _all_ things at _all_ times -- you and I, right now, ethos and praxis -- the thought _is_ the function and it's, it's named for you, it's named…"

He releases her hands and is off again, sifting through the papers still littering the floor.

" _Membraan, mysterie, magie…_ " he mutters, crawling on all fours through the debris, picking up and tossing aside pages as he hunts for a particular one. " _Monster, meester, moeder…_ "

Moira gets to her feet. "Siebren…"

"Ah!" he triumphantly shouts, gliding back to her with his quarry crumpled in one hand, and thrusts a page in front of her.

She takes it from him and smooths it open. A single symbol slashes across the white -- not the _∑_ that she'd found herself, but a letter _M_ roughly rendered in bold, dark lines.

"It's named for you," he says again, practically vibrating with excitement, his voice and eyes begging her to understand -- and, lo and behold, she does.

Membrane, mystery, magic, monster, master, mother: all interchangeable expansions of the same abbreviated concept: the Holy Grail of physics, under which every known fundamental force may be quantified and integrated into a single, elegant formulation.

"M-theory," she says, her heart thudding heavily in her chest at the magnitude of what he's implying, her nerves prickling hotly with the thrill of it.

" _Ja!_ " Siebren exclaims, seizing her by the shoulders and planting a hard kiss on the top of her head. " _Mijn wensster!_ It's written in the body -- your name in my body, condensation and, and cohesion -- _Heks,_ you need to solve for why, you need to..."

Witch.

Given the context, the title suddenly clicks.

_"If I knew the words I'd ask but there are only letters. **You** know; you can spell."_

Letters she can read that he cannot: DNA, and the chains of nucleobases used to write it -- cytosine, guanine, adenine, thymine; C, G, A, T.

Moira searches his eyes. "You're consenting to testing?"

Siebren wavers upon hearing it aloud, but it's not good enough when he reluctantly nods -- she needs to hear him say it, even in riddle form.

"Are you sure?" she demands. "Blood draws, biopsies, imaging?"

"I..." He swallows audibly. His gaze darts again around the ransacked room, and is clouded with guilt when it returns to hers. "…It must be done," he says. "No strings. I can't be real until you kiss me."

She knows he doesn't mean it literally, but Moira doesn't even hesitate, rushing up on her toes to take his face in her hands and press her lips to his, again and again. His breath is sour and his skin still streaked with sick and blood, but she doesn't give the slightest damn.

"You're real," she promises him between kisses, "you're real, you're real, you're real…"

He hugs her tightly, palming the back of her head when she tucks her face against the side of his neck.

"We...we can stay here now, yes?" he asks quietly, without pulling back. "You and I? I can stay with you?"

To say he's provided her with enough raw material to make a case for her continuing supervision of his progress would be vast understatement. Even if the tests don't reveal any immediately detectable anomalies, there's enough new information dispersed throughout this room alone to parcel out to Akande for weeks, once it's been marshalled and codified.

"Yes, Siebren, we're staying," she vows. "You're staying with me."

He'll never be anywhere else, if she can help it, and for the first time in a fortnight, it feels truly possible that her fight to keep him might be one she can win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, so much for Christmas, but thank you all for your continuing patience! We're getting there, I promise. Chapter title is a whole damn album by Björk (my favorite one of hers, in fact). See "Unravel," "Jóga," and "All Neon Like" for specifically Syzygy-sounding songs, if you'd like.
> 
> Also! Please go look at and give love to Glacier Llane's Sigmoira (and other!) art → instagram.com/glacier.llane ← She did a sketch of a scene from chapter three, and an actual Seabream de Kuiper, and they both Sent Me. T_T Her facial expressions, especially her Sigma's, are a gift, and we are very lucky to have her aboard our little rarepair rowboat. 🖤


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